The lethality of avian influenza H5N1 infections in humans has been a matter of extensive debate. The >50% case fatality rate established by WHO is high, but the lethality of the virus might be lower if there are many infections accompanied by mild or no disease. One way to answer this question is to determine …
Human infections with influenza H5N1 virus: How many? Read More »
I received the following email today from Judith S. Bond, President of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB): Dear Colleague, We need your help to counter a serious threat to the humane use of animals in research. The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (S 810), which would prohibit the use …
David Quammen, whose book Spillover was recently published, has been the recipient of a good deal of publicity in the past week. Last Wednesday he participated in a New York Academy of Sciences Symposium called ‘Wrath Goes Viral‘; on Saturday he was profiled in the New York Times (The Subject is Science, the Style is Faulkner), …
When I drafted my article for TakePart (Don’t Panic – Ebola Isn’t Heading For You), I used the term ‘ebolavirus’ throughout, but the editors changed every instance to ‘Ebola virus’. Understanding which term is correct is far more complicated than you might imagine. A new virus was first isolated in 1976 from patients during an …
The retrovirus XMRV does not cause prostate cancer or chronic fatigue syndrome – that hypothesis was disproved by the finding that the virus was produced in the laboratory in the 1990s by passage of a prostate tumor in nude mice. A trio of new papers on the virus attempt to address questions about the serological …
Ron Fouchier has discussed his influenza H5N1 transmission experiments in ferrets at an ASM Biodefense Conference, clarifying several assumptions about the transmissibility of the virus in this animal model. Two different influenza H5N1 strains were used for Fouchier’s experiments: a wild type virus, and a mutated virus (we’ll call it mutH5N1). He did not reveal the nature …
Influenza H5N1 is not lethal in ferrets after airborne transmission Read More »
