Word: virality
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According to the Associated Press, both Dartmouth student health clinic doctors and the CDC have warned the disease may spread to students from other campuses during spring break—as infected students visit friends who go to other colleges. Both viral and bacterial conjunctivitis are highly contagious and spread through direct contact with infected individuals and contaminated objects...
...Southern China has long been recognized as the incubator of flu viruses. Traditional Chinese farming practices?especially the close proximity of birds, pigs and humans?promote the mixing of viruses, which mutate and leap between species. New strains are constantly evolving as viral genes are swapped between host bird species. "The 1997 strain was a reassortment from three viruses from goose and, we think, the quail," says Kennedy Shortridge, a University of Hong Kong microbiologist who has studied influenza since...
...past this strategy hasn't worked in humans because our immune system, unlike those of other mammals, doesn't respond robustly enough to DNA alone. To amplify DNA's poor signal strength, Nabel's group sends in the "boost"--a crippled common-cold virus packed with a payload of viral antigens--a few days after priming, and the immune system goes into high gear. That's the theory, anyway...
...others plan to use every trick they have learned to boost its effectiveness. They may, for example, mix cytokines with the vaccine, counting on these chemicals to rally extra killer T cells against the virus. They may give a small jolt of electricity along with the priming dose of viral DNA; that shock seems to enhance the DNA's ability to trigger a response. And they are even experimenting with firing the DNA directly into immune-system cells at high pressure with so-called gene guns to make sure the nucleic acids have maximum impact...
...inventors of the gene gun thinks that shooting viral DNA could someday replace traditional vaccines. Dr. Stephen Johnston, director of the Center for Biomedical Inventions at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, is using medicine's newfound skill at sequencing genomes to figure out precisely what genes express, or turn on, when a bug first enters a host's cells. Using microarrays, also known as "DNA chips," Johnston is working to identify those genes, then snip them from a pathogen's genome and use them, or the proteins they make, as vaccines to trigger an immune response...