A leukemia-like cancer is killing soft-shell clams along the east coast of North America. The cancer is transmitted between animals in the ocean, and appears to have originated in a single clam as recently as 40 years ago. Hemic neoplasm is a disease of marine bivalves that is characterized by proliferation of morphologically and functionally aberrant hemocytes, the …
If the reader does not believe that viroids and satellites are distinctive, then surely prions, infectious agents composed only of protein, must impress. The question of whether infectious agents exist without genomes arose with the discovery and characterization of infectious agents associated with a group of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). These diseases are …
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 …
