Transmission of wild poliovirus continues in four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. From January 2006 to February 2007, the number of polio cases increased in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Poliovirus continues to circulate in these countries because insufficent numbers of infants receive three doses of oral polio vaccine – 69% and 64% in Afghanistan and …
Poliovirus is the etiologic agent of the paralytic disease known as poliomyelitis. It’s also the virus I’ve worked on for most of my career. The World Health Organization is in the midst of a massive effort to eradicate the disease, an undertaking that has encountered a number of obstacles. In coming posts I’d like to …
Gazette.net has written correctly about a norovirus outbreak: “County health officials said a virus passed from a single contact source caused students attending a conference at the University of Maryland in College Park to become sick over the weekend. “The virus, known as the Norovirus, causes gastroenteritis or stomach flu, and is usually spread through …
For the past month or so, a search of Google News for ‘virus’ has yielded mainly articles on computer viruses or West Nile virus. Why are there so many articles on West Nile virus? Summer is the prime season for transmission of this virus, which is spread to humans by mosquitoes. In temperate climates (e.g. …
So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite ’em And so proceed ad infinitum This verse is by Jonathan Swift, the 18th century Irish cleric and satirist. He wrote it about the time that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek began looking through the microscope and discovered …
An article in The Star of Malaysia illustrates why the public is often confused by stories about viruses in the popular press. The article reports that ‘a four-man medical research team from the University Malaya Medical Centre has achieved a first by discovering an anti-virus for dengue fever from herbs’. Let’s take apart this sentence …
