The third annual installment of my virology course at Columbia University, Biology W3310, has begun. This course, which I taught for the first time in 2009, is intended for advanced undergraduates and will be taught at the Morningside Campus. Until I started this course, no instruction in virology had been offered at the Morningside Heights …
After we discussed newly discovered entry factors for ebolavirus and hepatitis C virus on TWiV 166, the New York Times covered part of the story in Key protein may give Ebola virus its opening. Given my recent interest in the case fatality ratio of avian influenza H5N1, I was intrigued by the following introductory statement: Of the pathogens …
The finding of viral nucleic acid sequences in illegally imported wildlife products has attracted the attention of the New York Times, which published an article entitled From the jungle to J.F.K., viruses cross borders in monkey meat. It begins with a scary scenario: This may read like a passage from a Richard Preston novel, but …
Small fragments of viral nucleic acid cross borders in monkey meat Read More »
A year has passed since the last reported case of poliomyelitis in India, which occurred on 13 January 2011 in a two year old girl in Howrah, West Bengal. If no additional cases are reported in the next few weeks (some samples are currently being tested for the virus), then it will mark the first time …
Renowned influenza virologist Peter Palese has penned an opinion column for the science journal Nature in which he uses his experience in reconstructing the 1918 pandemic influenza virus strain to question the censoring of H5N1 results by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB): My colleagues and I were at the centre of a similar controversy …
The prominent lead editorial in the New York Times of Sunday, 8 January 2012 is entitled ‘An Engineered Doomsday’. It concerns recent avian influenza H5N1 research, in which scientists in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin found that by passaging the virus in ferrets it could acquire aerosol transmissibility. Let’s determine if the scientific facts …
N.Y. Times: H5N1 ferret research should not have been done Read More »
