On episode #3 of “This Week in Virology”, published on 2 October 2008, we talked about how the mortgage crisis is leading to abandoned swimming pools and an increase in infestation with mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus. Yesterday, the NY Times published a short article in the Science Times section entitled “First, Abandoned Pools, …
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 …
