MicrobeWorld

Interesting blog post on why health agencies such as the WHO and CDC need to develop a web-centric 24/7 communications strategy and more citizen friendly sites utilizing Web 2.0 tools. Read More

This thought provoking report suggests that it may be possible to track disease outbreaks via internet usage. An interesting concept that also has many caveats, as pointed out by CDC representatives in the article. Read More

photograph of carcass of swine showing lesions of swine erysipelas (b&w) Read More

Interesting, the FBI is paying the National Academy of Sciences almost $1M for a scientific review of their Anthrax investigation of Bruce E. Ivins, who is accused of sending the deadly letters in 2001. The academy panel will review genetic fingerprinting that led agents to Dr. Ivins’s Maryland ... Read More

This 2000 paper, published in Chest, shows that chicken soup is capable of inhibiting neutrophil chemotaxis in vitro, thus providing some evidence for the soup's traditional role as a home cure for respiratory infections.

Helpfully, the soup recipe used in the study is also included. And it ... Read More

On this special episode of This Week in Virology Vincent Racaniello and Dr. Read More

You have only one sneeze. Use it wisely.

Yes, it’s Stop Swine Flu, the video game.

The action starts with a schplouuush of green mucus hitting your screen, then switches to a street somewhere. Your avatar stands among pedestrians. The background noises are coughs, sneezes, noses being blo... Read More

The swine flu outbreak that began in Mexico and continues to spread around the globe may be particularly dangerous for young, otherwise healthy adults because it contains genetic components of the H5N1 avian influenza virus, which can induce a "cytokine storm," in which a patient's hyper-activat... Read More

Inhibiting the "drug efflux pumps" in bacteria, which function as their defense mechanisms against antibiotics, can mask the effect of mutations that have led to resistance in the form of low-affinity drug binding to target molecules in the cell. This is shown by researchers at Uppsala Universit... Read More

A recent paper published on Biomedcenteral by Jonathan E Allen , Shea N Gardner , Elizabeth A Vitalis, and Tom R Slezak discovers that new genetic markers for human host-specificity and high lethality in influenza viruses were identified by considering combinations of amino acids conserved amon... Read More

An editorial in Nature is urging scientists to serve as credible voices to inform their communities of the risks and uncertainties surrounding H1N1 (aka swine flu).

"Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The emergence of a new, swine-flu-related H1N1 strain of influenza in people in North Am... Read More

Public health experts worry that another potentially lethal pig-borne disease could establish itself among farmworkers in the United States.

Unlike the new swine flu virus, Streptococcus suis doesn’t pass from person to person. But it’s also more virulent, killing about one in 10 people in wh... Read More

Infections may be winding down in Mexico and causing fewer deaths worldwide than feared, but what is now keeping health officials awake at night is the possibility that a more virulent version will come roaring back and kill millions.

Flu pandemics historically come in waves, often getting wo... Read More

The Wall Street Journal health blog is reporting that a recent study that analyzed news releases posted on EurekAlert in 2005 exaggerated their findings 29% of the time.

The authors, led by Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth, looked at releases from EurekAlert issued by 20 academ... Read More

A $20 chip can cut the time it takes to distinguish swine flu—aka the H1N1 influenza A virus—from days to hours, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today. The company, InDevR plans to give away about 25 of its IntelliChip Readers (which normally cost $3,900 and scan t... Read More

The New York Times outlines NASA's plan for an experiment with yeast and antifungal drugs aboard Pharmasat, a nano satellite that will orbit the Earth and radio back data to researchers.

Previous experiments on the space shuttle and the International Space Station indicate that some organisms... Read More

An interesting read on how labs create vaccines for viruses. In this case the article mostly focuses on a facility in Westchester, NY who is working fast on a vaccine for swine flu (H1N1).

"the process involves repeated rounds of injecting the two types of virus into eggs, and sorting and pur... Read More

The link in the source field above will download the CDC's handwashing flyer which they just pushed out for public distribution in response to concerns about H1N1 (Swine Flu). Read More

This is an absurd story but is humorous nonetheless. It looks like Afghanistan has succumbed to Swine Flu fears and has quarantined it's nation's only pig, a gift from China that resides in Kabul's Zoo.

Afghanistan's only known pig has been locked in a room, away from visitors to Kabul zoo wh... Read More

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