Three virologists have been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Harald zur Hausen was recognized for discovering human papilloma virus (HPV), while Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi were acknowledged for first isolating human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). Zur Hausen isolated HPV type 16 in 1983 from women with cervical cancer. A year later he …
Last week Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense scientist, committed suicide. He was about to be indicted for murder in connection with the 2001 anthrax-letters incident. His death lead to an article in the New York Times questioning whether the boon in biodefense spending since 2001 has made the country less secure. The logic …
Since Monday I have been in Sitges, Spain for Europic 2008. This is a scientific meeting on picornaviruses held every other year in a European country. The picornaviruses are a family of non-enveloped, positive-strand RNA viruses, and includes poliovirus, rhinovirus, and foot-and-mouth disease virus. I have been attending Europic meetings since 1983, when it was …
There is an ongoing outbreak of enterovirus 71 (EV71) in a broad region of Asia, including China, Vietnam, Mongolia, Taiwan, and Singapore. There have been 3606 cases in China, including 36 deaths. Infection with EV71 is common in Asia, where it causes hand-foot-and-mouth disease in children, a febrile syndrome accompanied by flat or raised red …
According to ProMED mail, Chikungunya is rapidly spreading in Sri Lanka. Chikungunya virus is a togavirus in the alphavirus genus. The infection is spread by mosquitos, mainly Aedes aegypti. The viral disease has been known for more than 50 years in the tropics and savannahs of developing countries of Asia and Africa, but never has …
Recently there has been an outbreak of polio in Nigeria caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus, VDPV. This outbreak is not unusual except that it is the largest so far caused by VDPV. The first outbreak caused by VDPV was in the Dominican Republic/Haiti in 2001. But the Nigeria outbreak is of interest because it is a …
