Tag Archives: H1N1

NEWS: Short List

News:     March 17, 2011
Targeting cancer with magnetic microcarrier – Nanomedicine | As a rule chemotherapy is like using a blunderbuss against cancer. ‘Chemo’ is administered through the bloodstream, which of course goes everywhere in the body. While the anti-cancer chemistry can be targeted to a certain extent, it almost always has toxic side effects with other organs and [...]
Posted in News: | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

For the next pandemic: More data needed

News: Pandemics    June 3, 2010
When a disease spreads globally (a pandemic), tying global data together in a comprehensive model (or suite of models) is important to develop an accurate picture of the problem and to make effective decisions for public health. This makes sense, but is difficult to accomplish across many countries, as the last pandemic (the H1N1 virus) [...]
Posted in News: Pandemics | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The shape of viral past influences today’s pandemics

News: Pandemics    March 25, 2010
Say you’re blindfolded and you’re given some kind of ball to identify. You turn it over in your hands. It’s relatively small. It’s very hard. It has pronounced seams with big stitching. You know it’s a baseball…providing, of course, that you’ve handled baseballs before. So it is with your immune system facing a virus. By [...]
Posted in News: Pandemics | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pandemic postmortems

Impact: Pandemics    January 17, 2010
The thing about pandemics is that they don’t always pan out. If they rated pandemics on a scale of 1 to 10 (which they don’t), how far down on the scale before it’s hardly a pandemic? How high on the scale and people blame the medical community for failing to raise enough warning? Every time [...]
Posted in Impact: Pandemics | Also tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two genetic changes – bird flu becomes pandemic

News: Pandemics    November 20, 2009
Given all the uproar over H1N1 (‘swine flu’), does anyone remember H5N1? That’s ‘bird flu’ and only a couple years ago it was the bête noir of the world’s health organizations. Fortunately, although deadly (roughly a 60% fatality rate), bird flu was not readily transmitted human-to-human. Now we know why: It would need to make [...]
Posted in News: Pandemics | Also tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

To beat a pandemic: Vaccinate many, early

Impact: Pandemics    October 12, 2009
On the surface of it, the conclusion of a new study by the Stanford University School of Medicine seems intuitively correct and therefore pedestrian: Vaccinating early saves lives and costs less. However, translated to the real world – in the struggle to deal with the H1N1 (previously called swine flu) virus – the conclusion highlights [...]
Posted in Impact: Pandemics | Also tagged , , , | Leave a comment