Here is a question from one of the students in my recent vaccine lecture at Columbia University: “Isn’t OPV one of the cheapest and easiest to administer? What exactly are the benefits of stopping? Avoiding an isolated case of the disease caused by the administration of the vaccine? It seems like a statistical price that …
Today I lectured on poliovirus vaccines in the Cellular & Molecular Immunology course taught by an old friend, Mosh, at the Morningside campus. I promised the students a pdf copy of the lecture notes. Click here to download the 2.6 MB file. I very much enjoy teaching virology, but when the audience is engaged, it …
This is not virology, but it is nonetheless fascinating. Archaeologists have found fossilized human feces in a cave in Oregon. The fossils, called coprolites, are just over 14,000 years old. In addition, DNA analysis indicates that they contain human DNA, and furthermore indicate origins from Siberia and East Asia. This discovery is consistent with the …
From the February 29 2008 issue of Science comes yet another article on the H5N1 strain of influenza virus. This is the strain that is quite virulent in birds, and which has infected some humans, causing concerns about an imminent pandemic. Not all scientists believed the bird flu hype. As I wrote previously, Peter Palese, …
From the January 2008 issue of Microbe: “Well more than 99% of microbes from the environent do not thrive in culture and, historically, remain uncharacterized”. This is an astounding statistic. We only work on what we can propagate, naturally. But many microbes could be adapted to grow in culture, given time and effort. The potential …
I often lecture about polioviruses and poliovirus vaccines, and I am frequently asked why Salk or Sabin did not receive the Nobel Prize. I usually tell students because Salk did not discover anything new, but simply put together existing technologies in a productive way. Sabin once said that Salk didn’t invent anything, what he did …
