There is an article on Dengue in the NY Times this week. It’s short on science, but brings home the impact of the disease (which is rare in the US and Europe) in developing countries. The article focuses on the disease in Bangkok, where the United States Army maintains its largest overseas research laboratory. The …
Stay tuned for the first episode of my new podcast, ‘This Week in Virology’ – I’ll post the information here within the next few days.
A new article in the journal PLoS One (link) clearly shows that there is no association between measles virus vaccine and autism. The growing public concern over vaccination stems in part from the belief that the measles virus vaccine, given together with vaccines for mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine), causes autism. In the late 1990s …
The social development of the web 2.0 has largely bypassed science. Hugely popular websites such as facebook, myspace, twitter, digg, delicious and the like have millions of members and generate huge amounts of traffic. But those who use these sites come from all walks of life. None are devoted solely to science. This situation is …
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 …
Nearly one-third of the budget for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an institute of the National Institutes of Health, goes towards research on bioterrorism. The concern is that pathogenic viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms might be used in terrorist attacks, and therefore research is required to produce suitable vaccines and drugs. Whether …
