A year has passed since the last reported case of poliomyelitis in India, which occurred on 13 January 2011 in a two year old girl in Howrah, West Bengal. If no additional cases are reported in the next few weeks (some samples are currently being tested for the virus), then it ...

Renowned influenza virologist Peter Palese has penned an opinion column for the science journal Nature in which he uses his experience in reconstructing the 1918 pandemic influenza virus strain to question the censoring of H5N1 results by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB): My colleagues and I were at the ...

Science magazine is conducting a live chat about research that produced H5N1 influenza strains that are more easily transmissible between ferrets. Among the topics to be addressed will be the benefits and risks of the H5N1 transmissibility studies and whether they should be published in full; and should experiments that could help ...

The prominent lead editorial in the New York Times of Sunday, 8 January 2012 is entitled 'An Engineered Doomsday'. It concerns recent avian influenza H5N1 research, in which scientists in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin found that by passaging the virus in ferrets it could acquire aerosol transmissibility. Let's ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Rich Condit, and Alan Dove Vincent, Dickson, Rich, and Alan answer listener questions about XMRV, cytomegalovirus, latency, shingles vaccine, myxomavirus and rabbits, and more. Please help us by taking our listener survey. Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV 165 (61 MB .mp3, ...