I have worked on poliovirus for over thirty-six years, first as a posdoctoral fellow with David Baltimore in 1979, and then in my laboratory at Columbia University. The end of that research commences this year with the destruction of my stocks of polioviruses. In 2015 there were 70 reported cases of poliomyelitis caused by wild …
Science and technology play important roles in the nature and quality of our lives, so it is not surprising that as a society, we are increasingly challenged by problems that have a scientific component. Individual decisions about vaccines, regional choices about water availability, or global agreements about climate change all require that science have a …
By David Tuller, DrPH David Tuller is academic coordinator of the concurrent masters degree program in public health and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, the BMJ published the results of the Fatigue Intervention by Nurses Evaluation, or FINE. The investigators for this companion trial to PACE, also funded by the Medical …
An otherwise balanced review of selected aspects of Ebolavirus transmission falls apart when the authors hypothesize that ‘Ebola viruses have the potential to be respiratory pathogens with primary respiratory spread.’ The idea that Ebolavirus might become transmitted by the respiratory route was suggested last year by Michael Osterholm in a Times OpEd. That idea was widely criticized …
Ebolavirus will not become a respiratory pathogen Read More »
The cover of this week’s issue of Businessweek declares that ‘Ebola is coming’ in letters colored like blood, with the subtitle ‘The US had a chance to stop the virus in its tracks. It missed’. Although the article presents a good analysis of the hurdles in developing antibody therapy for Ebola virus infection, the cover …
Could the Ebola virus epidemic have been prevented? Read More »
Scientists for Science are confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment. The results of such research are often unanticipated and accrue over time; therefore, risk-benefit analyses are difficult to assess accurately. If we expect to continue …
