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Tag Archives: pandemic
Protein complexity could be our demise
Did you know that badly folded proteins could be the cause of our species’ destruction? Neither did I. I know about nuclear bombs, climate change, asteroid strike and even pandemic as possible doomsday scenarios. I’m aware of predictions that in the not too distant future mankind might be overpowered by or merge with artificial intelligence [...]
Posted in Impact: Proteomics Also tagged Alzheimer’s, DNA, folding, gene-pool, genetic drift, genetics, natural selection, Parkinson’s, prions, proteins 1 Comment
The shape of viral past influences today’s pandemics
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 H1N1, hemagglutinin, immune system, influenza, Spanish Flu, swine flu, Virology, virus, x-ray crystallography Leave a comment
Pandemic postmortems
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 bird flu, conspiracy, H1N1, swine flu, vaccine, WHO Leave a comment
Two genetic changes – bird flu becomes pandemic
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 [...]
To beat a pandemic: Vaccinate many, early
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 [...]
CRE: A killer coming to a critical care facility near you