Word: personics
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...prevent swine flu, can they help slow the spread of a pandemic? The most effective way of slowing a pandemic is to develop a vaccine. But doing so can take months. In the interim, antivirals may play a vital roll by making ill patients less contagious. When a person is sick with the flu, he or she "sheds" virus through coughing, sneezing and other excretions. Effective antivirals lessen the amount of virus a patient sheds (because the patient is not as severely ill) and shortens the length of time he or she sheds virus at all. Taking this into account...
...given a chance to spread. "It's fairly common in epidemics to see a trade-off between the ability to cause severe death and transmissibility," says Steven Kleiboeker, a virologist and the chief scientific officer for ViraCor Laboratories. The A/H1N1 virus may be attenuating itself as it spreads from person to person, becoming easier to catch but less dangerous. (Read "CDC Readies Swine-Flu Vaccine...
Novavax's strategy involves isolating three proteins from the virus that flag the human immune system, which then churns out neutralizing antibodies against the proteins. These antibodies are robust enough to fight off the actual virus should an immunized person become infected. This is the same way the recently developed vaccine against human papilloma virus, Gardasil, works. "It provides the look and feel of the flu virus but does not have the genetic materials to cause disease," Singhvi says. (Read about the vaccine being prepared in case of a pandemic...
...makes pigs such potent mixing bowls for flu. The roundabout bird-pig-human route may be less common than the straight bird-human jump, but it may be more problematic. Strains of avian flu, like the much-feared H5N1, can infect individual humans, but they can't make the person-to-person leap. Avian flu that is passed through the pig's mammalian system, however, can be passed readily among humans. (Read "Why Border Controls Can't Keep Out the Flu Virus...
...course with Washington over the past few years. But even more so than Chávez, who publicly warmed to U.S. President Barack Obama at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, Correa has been effusive about the new government in Washington. Obama is a "sincere, open, cordial person who creates great expectancy," Correa gushed after the Trinidad summit. Now it is a matter of seeing how well Correa's pragmatic socialism meshes with the policies in formation in Washington. (Read a story on the thawing relations between the U.S. and Latin America...