After the governors of New York and New Jersey decided that health workers who have returned from the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa should be subject to a 21-day quarantine, two Nobel laureates entered the fray. Bruce Beutler feels that the quarantine is the right thing to do, while Peter Doherty says it’s wrong. Which …
Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, believes that we would have an Ebola virus vaccine if not for the past ten years of flat budgets for life science research: NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, …
Would we have an Ebola virus vaccine if not for NIH cuts? Read More »
The World Health Organization has issued a situation assessment entitled ‘What we know about transmission of the Ebola virus among humans‘. WHO is rather late entering the transmission discussion which began on 12 September 2014 with the suggestion that Ebola virus transmission could go airborne. WHO is a big organization and moves slowly; nevertheless their …
The gain of function experiments in which avian influenza H5N1 virus was provided the ability to transmit by aerosol among ferrets were met with substantial outrage from both the press and even some scientists; scenarios of lethal viruses escaping from the laboratory and killing millions proliferated (see examples here and here). The recent publication of …
On episode #289 of the science show This Week in Virology, Vinny and the capsids answer listener questions about the definition of life, state vaccination laws, the basic science funding problem, viral ecology, inactivation of viruses by pressure, and much more. You can find TWiV #289 at www.microbe.tv/twiv.
Because all animal viruses initiate infection by binding to a receptor on the cell surface, this step has long been considered a prime target for antiviral therapy. Unfortunately, drugs that block virus attachment to cells have never shown much promise. Another approach, which is to ablate the receptor from the cell surface, is also problematic …
