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Sarah Muncy

4 more cases of new SARS-like virus confirmed - World - CBC News - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...avirus-sars-who-confirmed.html

virus world coronavirus

shared by Sarah Muncy on 25 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Two men in a single household fell ill and tested positive for the virus. One of the two died. Two other members of the same household were sick at the same time with similar symptoms; one of those men died as well.
  • It's not clear what kind of testing has been done. In fact, very little information about the cases has been revealed
  • is not known at this point whether the viruses jumped directly from bats to people — say through exposure to bat guano or urine — or from bats to other animals and then to humans.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The WHO said as of Friday there have been six confirmed cases of the infection
    • Sarah Muncy
      Sarah Muncy on 25 Nov 12
       
      I've had pneumonia several times in my life and no one has ever tested me for a viral type. When do cases get "reported?" Is it only when a person nearly dies?
  • Sarah Muncy on 25 Nov 12
     
    uh oh. The Hajj is a big time Islamic get-together, and was at the end of October. What a great opportunity to move a virus around, and for it to also escape detection in all the masses of people!
Casey Finnerty

Flu shot time? Google Flu Trends predicts worst season on record. - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/...t_season_on_record.single.html

virology microbiology influenza

shared by Casey Finnerty on 15 Jan 13 - Cached
  • If you ask the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, this year’s flu season is looking “moderately severe.”
  • if you ask Google Flu Trends, we’re in the midst of an outbreak that is shaping up to be the most extensive on record.
  • CDC still drives the bulk of national media coverage
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  • The CDC’s current estimates aren’t all that current.
  • the numbers can tell us only how many people were suffering from the flu a couple weeks ago.
  • scans millions of Google searches from around the world to track flu activity in near real time.
  • CDC outpatient surveillance figure of an unprecedented 8.9 percent.
  • “Is it going to be a more severe season than last year? I think without question,” Jhung said. “Is it going to be a more severe season than a couple years ago, or the previous 10 years? We don’t know, and won’t know until the end of the season.”
  • the dominant strain so far this year is H3N2, not the novel “swine flu” strain of H1N1 that spooked the world.
  • the figure to which Google Flu Trends corresponds is the one that tells us what percentage of outpatient doctor visits are flu-related at the institutions in the CDC’s reporting network. But a separate PLOS One study from 2011 found that it doesn’t correlate quite as well with another CDC metric that’s based on the number of laboratory-confirmed cases of the flu.
Casey Finnerty

Obama Presses Leaders to Speed Ebola Response - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-bolster-ebola-response.html

ebolavirus

shared by Casey Finnerty on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday night, administration officials said the Pentagon would ask Congress to redirect $500 million from existing Defense Department funds to fight Ebola. The money is in addition to $500 million the Pentagon requested last week in redirected funds for both Iraq and Ebola.
Casey Finnerty

Flu Deaths Reach Epidemic Level, but May Be at Peak - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...levels-but-may-be-peaking.html

virology influenza microbiology

shared by Casey Finnerty on 13 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Although the report supported getting flu shots, it said that new vaccines offering lifelong protection against all flu strains, instead of annual partial protection against a mix-and-match set, must be created.
  • “Vaccine effectiveness” is a very different metric from vaccine-virus match, which is done in a lab. Vaccine efficacy is measured by interviewing hundreds of sick or recovering patients who had positive flu tests and asking whether and when they had received shots.
  • During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, many elderly Americans had natural protection, presumably from flus they caught in the 1930s or ’40s.
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  • “Think about that,” Dr. Osterholm said. “Even though they were old, they were still protected. We’ve got to figure out how to capture that kind of immunity — which current vaccines do not.”
  • Dr. Bresee acknowledged the difficulties, saying: “If I had the perfect answer as to how to make a better flu vaccine, I’d probably get a Nobel Prize.”
  • a preliminary study rated this year’s vaccine as 62 percent effective, even though it is a good match for the most worrisome virus circulating.
  • urged Americans to keep getting flu shots.
  • Even though deaths stepped — barely — into epidemic territory for the first time last Saturday, the C.D.C. officials expressed no alarm, and said it was possible that new flu infections were peaking in some parts of the country.
  • Epidemiologists count how many death certificates are filed in a flu year, compare the number with normal years, and estimate what percentage were probably flu-related.
  • The C.D.C.’s vaccine effectiveness study bore out the point of view of a report released last year by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. It said that the shot’s effectiveness had been “overpromoted and overhyped,” said Michael T. Osterholm, the center’s director.
  • At the same time, he praised the C.D.C. for measuring vaccine effectiveness in midseason. “We’re the only ones in the world who have data like that,” he said.
  • “To get a vaccine across the ‘Valley of Death’ is likely to cost $1 billion,”
  • the metric means the shot “reduces by 62 percent your chance of getting a flu so bad that you have to go to a doctor or hospital.”
  • “far from perfect, but by far the best tool we have to prevent influenza.”
  • Most vaccinations given in childhood for threats like measles and diphtheria are 90 percent effective or better. But flu viruses mutate so fast that they must be remade annually.
Casey Finnerty

Why the New Coronavirus Unnerves Public Health: Remembering SARS | Wired Science | Wire... - 1 views

www.wired.com/...coronavirus-memory-sars

virology

shared by Casey Finnerty on 20 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Within a month, health authorities in 14 countries had identified more than 1,300 cases of respiratory illness that all traced back to those brief encounters somewhere in the hotel. Within five months, the illness — dubbed SARS, for severe acute respiratory syndrome — had caused 8,098 illnesses, and 774 deaths in 26 countries around the world.
Casey Finnerty

Dr. Donald A. Henderson, Who Helped End Smallpox, Dies at 87 - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-end-smallpox-dies-at-87.html

smallpox vaccine

shared by Casey Finnerty on 22 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Dr. Donald A. Henderson, a leader of one of mankind’s greatest public health triumphs, the eradication of smallpox, died on Friday in Towson, Md. He was 87.
  • died in a hospice of complications of a hip fracture, including infection with antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus, a dangerous pathogen he had himself researched and raised alarms about
  • The last known case was found in a hospital cook in Somalia in 1977.
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  • The only other disease to have been banished from the earth is rinderpest, a little-known relative of measles that kills hoofed animals and once caused widespread starvation in Africa; it was eradicated in 2011.
  • Smallpox, caused by the variola virus, was long one of mankind’s most terrifying scourges.
  • it killed almost a third of its victims, often through pneumonia or brain inflammation.
  • Many others were left blind from corneal ulcerations or severely disfigured by pockmarks.
  • Because it killed 80 percent of the American Indians who caught it, it was a major factor in the European conquest of the New World.
  • In 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner, an English physician, infected a young boy with cowpox taken from a blister on a milkmaid’s hand. Cowpox, a mild disease, protected those who had it from smallpox, and the modern vaccine era began.
  • Dr. Henderson quickly realized that trying to vaccinate vast populations was futile and switched to “ring vaccination.”
  • Dr. Foege, who is considered the father of this tactic, said it was “invented by accident” during a 1967 Nigerian outbreak when he had very little vaccine on hand.
  • “The first night, we asked ourselves what we would do if we were a virus bent on immortality,”
  • In 1977, success in hand, Dr. Henderson became dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.“He was an imposing guy — physically big and very confident,” said Dr. Michael J. Klag, the school’s current dean, who was a student in that era. “He did not suffer fools gladly, and you were never sure if you were a fool or not.”
  • He gloomily foresaw failure for most other disease-elimination campaigns. The “siren song of eradication,” he once wrote, had led to goals that were more “evangelical” than attainable.
  • The problem, he would explain, was that each viral foe was so different. Smallpox had many weaknesses to exploit; it had no animal host. Every case can be found because victims have pox on their faces, and one vaccination provides lifetime immunity.
  • In 2011, when Bill Gates threw the full weight of his foundation into fighting polio, he struggled to explain how he would overcome such obstacles and, at the end of an interview, turned to an aide and said aloud, “I’ve got to get my D. A. Henderson response down better.”
  • The campaign, many experts have noted, succeeded just in time. A few years later, the virus that causes AIDS spread across Africa. Because the live smallpox vaccine can grow in an immune-compromised person into a huge, rotting, ultimately fatal lesion, it would have been impossible to deploy it.
Casey Finnerty

New tick-borne virus puts the bite on Missouri farmers - Vitals - 3 views

vitals.nbcnews.com/...s-the-bite-on-missouri-farmers

virology

shared by Casey Finnerty on 04 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • “This particular virus has never been detected before,” said Nicholson. “This is unique to the world.”So far, the Missouri men are the only known victims of the new germ, which has been identified as a phlebovirus, part of the Bunyaviridae family of potentially serious bugs. Hantavirus, spread by deer mice, comes from that group. So does the deadly Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
Casey Finnerty

The Quest to End the Flu - Carl Zimmer - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354677

influenza virology vaccination

shared by Casey Finnerty on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Fauci is more excited about something called a recombinant protein vaccine, which does not rely on growing viruses, even though it is cell-based. At Protein Sciences, a small Connecticut biotech firm, researchers isolate the gene for the flu virus’s surface proteins and insert it into an entirely different species of virus, called a baculovirus. The baculovirus infects insect cells and causes them to make huge amounts of the surface proteins, which the company uses to make Flublok, the only recombinant protein flu vaccine currently available.
  • The researchers have tried various methods, including the same one used to make Flublok—insect cells churning out surface proteins.
  • “The eggs should be long gone,” grumbles Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
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  • Manufacturers for the most part still make flu vaccines the way they did in World War II: in chicken eggs.
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