nodalpoint.org - Immunology - Comments

More avian flu resources, and a note on the Connotea resources

Declan Butler — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 05:12:05 -0500

Hi, I'm the keeper of the avian flu firehose on Connotea -- its meant to be used via its RSS feed as a sort of daily newswire. At Nature we also have an updated focus section on avian flu. I've also made some rough Google Earth maps of avian flu outbreaks, that will be refined when I get a moment.

Declan

Quite

chris — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 04:47:32 -0400

The logistics angle may be the defining criterion for pandemic threat status. That we are more prepared now than in 1918 is a disingenuous point to make - there is a much greater population to contend with, travel (and hence geographical spread) is much faster, and our medical facilities - where they exist - are probably under more strain than a century ago.

We didn't stop AIDS, and we didn't stop Ebola (it wiped itself out). Granted, we didn't know how to cure those diseases. But we do know a lot about TB, and we don't seem able to stop a resurgence of resistant strains - everyone just seems to be praying very hard it doesn't escalate. And that's a bug, not a virus, which would normally make it easier to treat...

It seems to non-specialist me that the one thing that is really keeping a serious wave of infection at bay is the relatively low frequency of transmission from animal to human host, and the even lower ability of the virus to spread between humans. But how long will that last? Any virologists care to comment?

NCBI Influenza Virus Resource

Tobi — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 16:31:55 -0400

Maybe also interesting in this context: A database of all influenza sequences in Genbank is provided by the NCBI.

links on Connotea

alf — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:10:34 -0400

I found Nature journalist Declan Butler's 'AvianFlu'-tagged links on Connotea to be a useful resource too, though it's quite a firehose of information.

Have seen an interesting

Stewb — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 06:50:59 -0400

Have seen an interesting post on Instapundit blogged a few times... "is avian flu being overhyped?". It's a letter from a doctor at the University of Chicago saying that we're much better prepared to deal with a flu pandemic than we were in 1918, so no worries.

Though I agree with what he writes, I couldn't help thinking: sure, with the help of modern medicine we shouldn't have that much to fear, but isn't any possible avian flu pandemic a logistical nightmare rather than a medical one? We know how to treat it, will know how to vaccinate people against it in fairly short order and so on but that's no good if you don't have enough hospital beds / respirators / vaccines to go round.

Tutorial is free

Neil — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 00:57:26 -0400

Far as I can tell the article requires subscription, the tutorial is free. Looks quite interesting, even with those horror words "UCSC browser" ;-)