Robert Herriman, co-founder of The Global Dispatch, recently started a radio show called Outbreak News This Week. Robert calls the show €œYour source for all the news about worms and germs€. He covers the latest news and information about infectious diseases and often includes interviews with expert guests. The show can be heard live Saturday mornings …
Virologist John Holland passed away on 11 October 2013. I asked former members of his laboratory for their thoughts on his career and what he meant to them. Bert Semler For more than 35 years, John Holland was a major figure and leading contributor in the study of RNA viruses. His early pioneering work on …
The SARS pandemic of 2002-2003 is believed to have been caused by a bat coronavirus (CoV) that first infected a civet and then was passed on to humans. The isolation of a new SARS-like coronavirus from bats suggests that the virus could have directly infected humans. A single colony of horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus sinicus) in Kunming, Yunnan …
Bat SARS-like coronavirus that infects human cells Read More »
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), …
