In the current episode of the Penn State University interview series called "Conversations from Penn State", Peter Hudson, who is Willaman professor of biology and director of Penn State's Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, discusses the dynamics of infectious diseases, their spread, and their transmission from animals to humans.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, and Eric O. Freed On episode 37 of the podcast "This Week in Virology " (TWiV), Vincent, Alan, and Eric Freed talk about vesivirus contamination of bioreactors, pandemic influenza, maximizing the effect of vaccination by targeting children, chikungunya virus, and open access scientific journals. [powerpress ...

One notable characteristic of the four previous influenza pandemics is that they occurred in multiple waves. The 1918 pandemic began with outbreaks of low mortality in the spring and summer, followed by a more lethal wave in the winter. This pattern has fueled speculation that the current H1N1 pandemic strain ...

Readers of virology blog have no doubt seen news reports that a Brazilian influenza isolate called A/Sao Paulo/1454/2009 (H1N1) is novel strain with mutations that enable it to infect new hosts. Here is one example of such a report, from The Australian: Brazilian scientists have identified a new strain of ...

A network of ~150 laboratories in the United States participate in virological surveillance for influenza. The results of these analyses are publicly available, and provide extremely interesting characterization of the pandemic spread of the new H1N1 strain. During week 22, 6,664 samples were submitted for testing, of which 2,681 were ...