Last February, Virology Blog posted an open letter to The Lancet and its editor, Dr. Richard Horton, describing the indefensible flaws of the PACE trial of treatments for ME/CFS, the disease otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome (link to letter). Forty-two well-regarded scientists, academics and clinicians put their names to ...

From the twiVivants, follow up on FluMist and Zoster vaccines, Zika virus update, and isolation of a multicomponent animal virus from mosquitoes. You can find TWiV #404 at microbe.tv/twiv, or listen below. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV404.mp3"] Click arrow to play Download TWiV 404 (91 MB .mp3, 126 min) Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email Become a patron of TWiV!

There are many examples of viruses with segmented genomes - like influenza viruses - but these genomes segments are packaged in  one virus particle. Sometimes the genome segments are separately packaged in virus particles. Such multicomponent viruses are commonly found to infect plants and fungi, but only recently have examples of ...

The TWiV team takes on an experimental plant-based poliovirus vaccine, contradictory findings on the efficacy of Flumist, waning protection conferred by Zostavax, and a new adjuvanted subunit zoster vaccine. You can find TWiV #403 at microbe.tv/twiv, or listen below. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV403.mp3"] Click arrow to play Download TWiV 403 (70 MB .mp3, 96 min) Subscribe (free): iTunes, RSS, email Become ...

Although the use of the live, attenuated (Sabin) poliovirus vaccines has been instrumental in nearly eradicating the virus from the planet, the rare reversion to virulence of these strains has lead to the World Health Organization to recommend their replacement with inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV). Unfortunately IPV is also not without ...