Virus

Five more die in Saudi Arabia of deadly new SARS-like virus which attacks many different organs at once. Two further victims of the mysterious new virus are in intensive careLatest deaths bring the total suspected toll from the virus up to 16Experts warn that if it mutates further it could cause a deadly pandemic By Damien Gayle Published: 16:21 GMT, 2 May 2013 | Updated: 16:21 GMT, 2 May 2013.

Flu viruses derive from a global selective sweep in the 1870s. Phylogeny inference, or tree building, is used to deduce the history of entities related by common descent, whether they're genes, populations, or species. Ultimately, it can reveal the evolutionary relationships between these entities, even if we don't have access to the intermediate steps. But it's a method that has to be used cautiously. "Erroneous conclusions can show strong statistical support," warns a new paper, published in Nature. Andrew Rambaut's lab, which wrote the paper, issued that warning because phylogenetic studies can have serious practical implications: "This is a serious problem given that such results are widely used to infer when, where, and how pandemic and panzootic viruses have emerged.

" See the front lines of pandemic virus war—thanks to The Weather Channel? [Updated] You know the drill: Broken test tube infects patient zero, who infects everyone else, society runs amok, white-coated scientists (or the empty labs they left behind) save the day.

But that’s not really the drill. If you watch Virus Hunters on The Weather Channel starting this week, you’ll learn that scientists keep the world from global outbreak in a much more thought-out (and less apocalyptic) way. The six-part series is based on Spillover, David Quammen’s book about nature’s biggest viral mysteries, which was nominated for a PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Although sometimes TV adaptations can take liberties with science, there's no need to worry about whether it will land on the cutting room floor this time around, as Quammen told Ars he’s helping out as an executive producer with the production. “It’s going to really geek on the science," says Neil Katz, an editor with Weather.com. Asymmetric (Gender) Warfare & Japan's Rubella Virus Outbreak - Body Horrors. Hepatitis viruses. Blood-Borne Disease Transmission at the Hajj.

With Hanukkah and Christmas just recently past and Chinese New Year fast approaching, it seems a suitable time to consider the topic of religious celebrations and infectious diseases, no?

Purdah? I Hardly Know Ya!: Social Influences On Middle East Respiratory Syndrome - Body Horrors. Today in The New York Times coverage of a report published yesterday on a Saudi hospital-borne outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome released by The New England Journal of Medicine, a potential epidemiological phenomenon was briefly addressed: men have made up the majority of infected cases and the low rates of infection among women may be due to an emphasis on the wearing of the face veil, known as the “niqab,” in Arab culture.

An international team investigated the epidemiological characteristics of an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) among four hospitals in eastern Saudi Arabia that occurred between April 1 to May 23, 2013. Rabies the Bestial Virus: The Infectious Origins of Werewolves, Zombies & Vampires. Rabies is one of mankind’s long-feared diseases.

And rightfully so: for centuries, a bite from a crazed, slavering animal was almost always a guarantee of a slow warping of the mind and a pained, gruesome demise. A death sentence. I just recently finished reading about our long and tragic relationship with rabies in Rabid: A Cultural History Of The World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, easily one of the finest non-fiction narratives on infectious diseases. The husband-and-wife duo have synergistically joined forces as a journalist and public health veterinarian to write a witty and thorough telling of the history and cultural mythology of the virus and the animals that it infects, us included.

What The Smallest Infectious Agents Reveal About Evolution. May 23, 2013 Radically different viruses share genes and are likely to share ancestry, according to research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Virology Journal this week.

The comprehensive phylogenomic analysis compares giant viruses that infect amoeba with tiny viruses known as virophages and to several groups of transposable elements. The complex network of evolutionary relationships the authors describe suggests that viruses evolved from non-viral mobile genetic elements and vice versa, on more than one occasion. The recent discovery of virophages inside the giant viruses, which in turn infect amoeba, has led to speculation about their origin and their relationship to other viruses and small transposable genetic elements.

Eugene Koonin explains: “Between the known virophages there are six conserved genes, arranged in a similar way. David Quammen says we better brace for the next Big One. David Quammen is probably best known for his writings about bizarre, beastly, or wildly eccentric animals, and the scientists who study them.

His long-running column for Outside magazine, Natural Acts, read like a bestiary of the planet’s most intriguing creatures. And with books like his 1997 tome The Song of the Dodo and the 2004 Monster of God, he has sounded the alarm about the looming extinction crisis and the unraveling of the Earth’s ecosystems. Now he’s written another opus, this one about creatures so small that we can see them only with the aid of an electron microscope. It’s his most captivating — and, by far, his scariest — book yet. Quammen says the inspiration for Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic came while he was on a trans-African hike with biologist Michael Fay in 2000. The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin.

When Ian Lipkin chose a career in infectious diseases, he envisioned hunting for pathogens in daring treks around the world.

Though disappointed to learn that modern-day virus hunters work largely from the lab, he still wound up a pioneer. A Hidden Universe that would Reach Out 100 Million Light Years. In the invisible, parallel world of Earth's they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world.

There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Planet Earth, which is more stars than are in the Universe -- stacked end to end, they would reach out 100 million light years. Over tens, hundreds and millions years, our ancestors have been picking up retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus) that reproduce by taking their genetic material and inserting it into our own chromosomes. There are probably about 100,000 elements in the human genome that you can trace to a virus ancestor. They make up about 8 percent of our genome, and genes that encode proteins only make up 1.2 percent of our genome making us more virus than human. The disease was first discovered at Fort Riley, Kansasand Queens, New York , in 1918.