When infection with hepatitis C virus goes from acute to chronic, severe liver disease may occur which requires organ transplantation. Nearly 200 million people are chronically infected with HCV, necessitating approaches to preventing and treating infections. No HCV vaccine is available, and current antiviral therapy consists of administration of interferon ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Michael Gale On episode 85 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent and Michael Gale discuss the origin, pathogenesis, prevention, of hepatitis C virus, and how it evades innate immune responses. This episode is sponsored by Data Robotics Inc. Use the promotion code TWIVPOD to ...

Robert H. Silverman, one of the authors on the study implicating the new human retrovirus XMRV as an etiologic agent of chronic fatigue syndrome, has written an excellent review article on the current status of research on the virus. The article is behind a paywall at Nature Reviews Urology, so ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello and Dickson Despommier On episode 11 of the podcast "This Week in Parasitism", Vincent and Dickson continue their discussion of malaria, with emphasis on clinical aspects of the disease. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twip/TWiP011.mp3"] Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiP is brought to you by ...

One property of viruses that is difficult to conceptualize is their small size. I can tell you that viruses can be anywhere from 20 to 750 nanometers in diameter, but that's not easy to visualize, even for those of us who routinely work with small measurements. One way to demonstrate ...