Posts tagged with ‘infectious disease’
ScienceInsider reports that the World Health Organization is couching its language so carefully that at a press briefing yesterday, a spokesperson said it is now “really very close” to calling the international H1N1 influenza outbreak a “pandemic.” At issue is the need to communicate disease risk without triggering unnecessary panic. The WHO pandemic alert system designed [...]
As the swine flu outbreak nears a potential global pandemic, discussions about strategies to control the spread and severity of infection continue. Andrew Pollack discusses the development of a universal flu vaccine today in the New York Times. The work is especially challenging, he explains, because the proteins that do not vary from strain to [...]
ScienceInsider posted an illuminating (albeit rather technical) interview yesterday evening with Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In it, he explains the swift work CDC has done investigating the genetics of the swine flu virus.
The detective work, still underway, indicates that the [...]
Public health measures that reduce the potential for spreading disease through groups of people present a strong defense in the face of an outbreak. We should have been talking about them earlier.
Almost one million people died of malaria in Africa in 2006, according to the World Health Organization. Stopping this devastating disease requires a new set of tools, some of which might include mosquito-killing drugs, drugs designed to evade parasite resistance, or perhaps even mosquito-immobilizing lasers.
In an effort to halt the spread of infections, health groups [...]
