Virology
Should viral vaccines be made for profit?
By Vincent Racaniello
This past week the vaccine against influenza made world news when the British government suspendend the manufacturing license of a Liverpool factory that produces the vaccine. The factory is owned by Chiron, which had hoped to sell influenza vaccine produced there in the U.S. As a consequence, the U.S. will ...
Science Fiction or Fact?
By Vincent Racaniello
In "The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS", Edward Hooper claims that HIV-1 was introduced into humans in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1950s. He suggests that the stocks of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) that were being used in clinical trials were produced ...
Poliovirus
By Vincent Racaniello
Poliovirus is the etiologic agent of the paralytic disease known as poliomyelitis. It's also the virus I've worked on for most of my career. The World Health Organization is in the midst of a massive effort to eradicate the disease, an undertaking that has encountered a number of obstacles. In ...
Norovirus Redux
By Vincent Racaniello
Gazette.net has written correctly about a norovirus outbreak: "County health officials said a virus passed from a single contact source caused students attending a conference at the University of Maryland in College Park to become sick over the weekend. "The virus, known as the Norovirus, causes gastroenteritis or stomach flu, ...
West Nile Virus
By Vincent Racaniello
For the past month or so, a search of Google News for 'virus' has yielded mainly articles on computer viruses or West Nile virus. Why are there so many articles on West Nile virus? Summer is the prime season for transmission of this virus, which is spread to humans by ...
