Word: virus
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...speed things up is to toss out the eggs and grow the viruses in human cells. Any virus that can infect humans will, by definition, grow easily in human-cell cultures, so that step could cut the incubation time to three months. Chiron, one of the world's leading manufacturers of the egg-dependent flu vaccine, is testing its first cell-culture technique, which it plans to apply to seasonal and pandemic flu vaccines. The Department of Health and Human Services last spring awarded a $97 million contract to Sanofi-Aventis, a Paris-based drug company, to develop avian...
Growing large batches of live virus, however, is a tricky business, and some scientists are turning to genetic engineering to improve the output. Tweak some genes, and you can make a virus that grows more easily in cell cultures. Tweak others, and the virus becomes a better target for the body's immune system...
...these methods are just stopgap solutions, since a full-fledged flu pandemic would kill millions of people before the vats made enough vaccine to meet demand. Ultimately, vaccine makers may need to go straight to the source: the flu virus' genetic code. By extracting snippets of viral RNA and transforming them into DNA strands, scientists can in theory create a template for antibodies that can ward off flu. Researchers at PowderMed in Oxford, England, have created a DNA cassette into which they can insert genes from whatever flu virus is going around and, they say, have a vaccine ready...
...Craig Schmugar, virus research manager at McAfee's Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team Labs, says that disabling the Picture and Fax Viewer is a good "roadblock," while users wait for a patch. (The downside is that if you don't have another picture viewer installed, you will have difficulty opening image files.) Schmugar also echoes Microsoft's suggestion that users check that their anti-virus software is up-to-date. McAfee and other anti-virus software makers have traced all known attacks to mitigate damage an intrusion might cause...
...contacts didn't hurt either. In 2003, when President Bush visited an AIDS clinic in Entebbe, Uganda, he was welcomed by a children's choir singing America the Beautiful. Then a woman named Agnes Nyamayarwo told the story of how she was unknowingly infected with HIV and passed the virus on to her son during his birth. AIDS drugs cost $40 a month in Uganda, but the government spends just $7 per person per year on health care; Nyamayarwo, a nurse, could not afford to keep her son alive. When she finished speaking, Bush embraced her. Nyamayarwo, it turns...