The World Health Organization's global polio eradication effort uses the live, attenuated poliovirus vaccines developed by Albert Sabin. When the eradication program was announced in 1988, the goal was to eliminate global poliomyelitis, then cease immunization with poliovirus at some point in the future. In 2002 an outbreak of polio ...

The best way to prevent influenza is by immunization. Unlike vaccines for polio and measles, which confer life-long immunity, the influenza vaccine protects for only one year. Influenza virus undergoes antigenic variation, necessitating annual production of a new vaccine. Is it possible to formulate an influenza vaccine that protects against all virus ...

The treatment of AIDS patients with a combination of three or four antiviral drugs is known as HAART, or highly active antiretroviral therapy. Combination therapy has been effective for long-term control of infection, and represents one of the high points in AIDS research. The downside of HAART is that strict ...

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2008 was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP. Dr. Chalfie's contribution was to show that GFP could be used as a genetic tag by producing the protein in the ...

In episode #21 of This Week in Virology, Vincent, Dick, and Alan are joined by Max Gottesman, who has researched viruses of bacteria - bacteriophages - for many years. They discuss an unusual wasp-virus symbiosis, influenza transmission and absolute humidity, how mosquitoes survive Dengue virus infection, and bacteriophages. Click the ...