Recent Posts
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Mutations and the escape from immunity
Posted by Atila Iamarino | January 22, 2010 | 7 CommentsIf measles is caused by a virus and it can only be caught once in a life time, why do we catch the flu every year?
When we have the flu, in a few days the body seems to get rid of the virus. The symptoms rarely last for two weeks and, in a higher period; [...]
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Flu and art
Posted by Atila Iamarino | January 17, 2010 |Despite the negative image we have about the flu, nothing prevents it from having a certain beauty. This is how the English artist Luke Jerran transforms the way how we see the Influenza. With his glass sculptures, the virus gains an incredible and realistic beauty, once their size is smaller than the length of [...]
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Influenza A H1N1: The coming plague
Posted by Atila Iamarino | November 14, 2009 | 2 CommentsThere are e-mails in circulation stating that some magazines had surprisingly predicted the epidemic of Influenza A (H1N1) years in advance. I immediately remembered an excellent book, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, a journalist who won the Pulitzer Award for his work in epidemics.
In this book, besides discussing a number of very dangerous epidemics, [...] -
Antivirals and resistance: Adamantanes
Posted by Atila Iamarino | November 6, 2009 |In the case of a pandemic, and during the seasonal epidemics, once a person has already contracted the influenza, we can do little, other than monitor and treat him with antivirals. However, they are not always a guarantee of success, especially in the case of resistant viruses.
Amantadine and rimantadine are the first drugs used against [...] -
Antiviral and resistance: sialidase inhibitors
Posted by Atila Iamarino | October 21, 2009 | 2 CommentsFrom adamantine therapeutics failures, interest in developing new drugs against the flu virus had come up. Hence, appeared oseltamivir and zanamivir, neuraminidase inhibitors, the first class of planned drugs against Influenza. Here, the path taken for their production was reverse of that of amantadine. Instead of testing the drug and finding out later how [...]
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Vaccine against flu: Distribution
Posted by Atila Iamarino | October 16, 2009 |If you think that all problems are solved after you have read all about the long vaccine production, you’re wrong. There is still the issue of distribution:
As the vaccine manufacturing process is slow and continuous, it is not possible to produce enough doses for everyone. Nowadays, our yearly vaccine production is of 700 to 900 [...]
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Vaccine against Influenza: Production
Posted by Atila Iamarino | October 10, 2009 | 6 CommentsWe are in full production phase of vaccines against the Influenza A (H1N1), and some doses are already being distributed in the United States. However, if the virus was already circulating in May, why did it take so long to have the vaccine available? Understand why in this series of posts, beginning with the production [...]
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Find out more about Influenza by playing games
Posted by Atila Iamarino | October 7, 2009 | 2 CommentsThere is a series of well conceived online games that help to expose and to understand concepts about the flu and other diseases. Find out what some of them have to add on
The Great FluWith several resources that include instructive videos and relevant and realistic information about the Influenza, the [...]
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This Week In Virology
Posted by Atila Iamarino | October 3, 2009 |Vincent Racaniello is a professor at the Microbiology department in Columbia University. He is extremely engaged with scientific disclosure on virology. Racaniello is also one of the authors of the book “Principles of Virology” and he could not continue transmitting such content only in books.
His blog, Virology, contains regular texts [...] -
The effectiveness of school closings during an epidemic
Posted by Atila Iamarino | October 1, 2009 |Children have a very important role transmitting the Influenza virus. Since they had less contact with the virus, their immune reaction is lower and less effective; therefore, during the infection they have a higher viral load. A higher viral load associated with contact with several other children from different places in the same school, playing [...]
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Influenza Air Transmission
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 28, 2009 |Although it is one of the most basic issues, Influenza virus transmission is still the target of much discussion. The role of contact contamination or through droplets and aerosols is considered a hot potato [1]. After a certain period without many experiments, nowadays we are aware that ferrets and guinea pigs may be infected by [...]
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Transmission of Influenza: by contact
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 23, 2009 |In the next text we shall see how Influenza can be transmitted by air. Now we shall see the role of contact in its transmission.
Transmission of Influenza by contact can be direct or indirect. Direct contact occurs when we come in contact with the secretions of a sick person and we place our hands on [...]
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How do we name Influenza A?
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 20, 2009 |Where do the name H1N1 and all the other names come from? What determines the number of H and N?
Established by WHO in1980 [1], the nomenclature of Influenza A consists of: type of host, in case the virus has not been isolated from humans; geographical region of origin; number of lineage; year of isolation and; [...] -
Influenza A H1N1: Guns, germs and steel
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 14, 2009 |In another comment to bring about important discussions on the flu Leonardo asked the following:
I was taking a look at the dates of pandemics: don’t you think these re-arrangements are a little bit connected to agriculture industrialization? Mainly to pigs and poultry farming? Packs full of antibiotics and vaccines? Isn’t it a favorable condition for [...] -
Molecule of the month presents: Hemagglutinin and Neuramidase
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 10, 2009 | 1 CommentMolecule of the month is an initiative of the RCSB PDB (A Resource for Studying Biological Macromolecules – Protein Data Bank) a protein structure bank. Every month, David Goodsell chooses an interesting structure and describes it, besides illustrating it very well. The illustrations are made available in a high resolution image that may be downloaded.
Goodsell [...] -
Prior immunity and flu
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 9, 2009 | 5 CommentsI received a comment from Paulo Amaral with amazing questions, leading me to advance this post. As follows, you can find the questions and the answer explaining what is relevant:
Would the annual vaccination against flu be liable for the low number of reports in elders?
What is the efficacy of the vaccine produced by mettles of [...] -
Why do we fear influenza 2 – the virus
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 8, 2009 | 1 CommentIn the previous text, I addressed why it is difficult to develop antivirals, here we will understand the characteristics of the influenza virus that worries us.
Where do viruses come from and what makes them more or less dangerous?
The virus that infects us may already be with us during our evolutive history, [...] -
PLoS Currents: Influenza, revolutionizing the way on how we deal with a pandemic
Posted by Atila Iamarino | September 1, 2009 |PLoS, Public Library of Science, has just announced PLoS Currents: Influenza. It is a partnership among NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), Google and PLoS, a blog structure hosted by Google Knol. It is a kind of blog and wiki, a site nurtured by content produced by the users but [...]
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Why do we fear Influenza 1 – the antivirals
Posted by Atila Iamarino | August 27, 2009 | 4 CommentsFirst of all, to start this blog, and discuss the H1N1 and the flu in general, I decided to start with texts considering the other side of the Influenza. Let’s see what is going on with the virus and the decisions taken towards the virus.
With viruses such as Ebola, which killed even 90% of the [...]