Vaccines have provided considerable success in preventing viral disease, but they have modest or no therapeutic effect for individuals who are already infected. Consequently, our second arm of antiviral defense has been the development and use of antiviral drugs: they can stop an infection once it has started. However, despite 50 years of research, our arsenal ...

My colleagues (generally the older ones) often ask me why I blog or podcast. They believe that I am wasting my time. After all, I am a scientist, and it is my job to carry out research. In order to do this I must publish papers and obtain grants. The ...

On This Week in Virology episode #9, Vincent and Dick recall the discovery of Lassa virus in Africa in 1969. A non-fictional account of the story, 'Fever', written by John G. Fuller and published in 1974, inspired Vincent to become a virologist. Part of the story took place at Columbia-Presbyterian ...

The article which describes the use of search engine data to predict influenza epidemics, discussed previously on this blog, was published today in the journal Nature. The title of the article is "Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data", and the abstract can be found here.

It was bound to happen: a few days after announcing its flu trends service, Google is under fire from advocacy groups which claim their information gathering violates user privacy. The NY Times has the story today. Google flu isn't new: it uses search data in the same way that it ...