Overview of Viral Infections - Infections. Many antiviral drugs work by interfering with replication of viruses. Most drugs used to treat HIV infection work this way. Because viruses are tiny and replicate inside cells using the cells' own metabolic functions, there are only a limited number of metabolic functions that antiviral drugs can target. In contrast, bacteria are relatively large organisms, commonly reproduce by themselves outside of cells, and have many metabolic functions that antibacterial drugs (antibiotics) can target. Therefore, antiviral drugs are much more difficult to develop than antibiotics. Antiviral drugs can be toxic to human cells. Most antiviral drugs can be given by mouth. Antibiotics are not effective against viral infections, but if a person has a bacterial infection in addition to a viral infection, an antibiotic is often necessary.
Interferon drugs are replicas of naturally occurring substances that slow or stop viral replication. Spit Spreads Death. Pandemic Perspectives Mütter Museum historical curator Jane E. Boyd discusses the parallels between the 1918–1919 flu pandemic and the coronavirus. Episode 247 | April 14, 2020 Distillations Podcast | Episode 247 | April 14, 2020 In the fall of 1918 the (misnomered) Spanish flu ravaged much of the world. When the Mütter Museum embarked on the multiyear exhibition and public art project Spit Spreads Death, the curators and researchers behind it had no idea how relevant it would become—or how quickly. Credits | Research Notes | Transcript Credits Host: Alexis Pedrick Senior Producer: Mariel CarrProducer: Rigoberto HernandezMusic: “Dry Earth” by Robbie Redway and Ben Jackson, courtesy of the Audio Network.
Research Notes Davis, Kenneth C. Flynn, Megan. Mütter Museum, College of Physicians of Philadelphia. For further reading check out: Barry, John M. Crosby, Alfred W. Porter, Katherine Anne. Spinney, Laura. Transcript Hello and welcome to Distillations. So I'm just going to start at the beginning. During the 1918 Pandemic, 'Mask Slackers' Were Labeled as Unpatriotic - HISTORY. Many of the methods Americans used in 1918 to try to prevent the spread of the flu are similar to what people began doing during the COVID-19 pandemic: Close schools.
Wear masks. Don’t cough or sneeze in someone’s face. Avoid large events and hold them outside when possible. And no spitting. Health and city officials got the word out about these guidelines in all kinds of ways. In Philadelphia, streetcar signs warned “Spit Spreads Death.” In New York City, officials enforced no-spitting ordinances and encouraged residents to cough or sneeze into handkerchiefs (a practice that caught on after the pandemic). In western states, some cities adopted mask ordinances, and officials argued wearing one was a patriotic duty. WATCH: World War I Documentaries on HISTORY Vault ‘Wear a Mask and Save Your Life!’ The PSA in the Chronicle appeared on October 22, just over a week before San Francisco had scheduled its mask ordinance to begin on November 1. For the most part, San Franciscans listened. The coronavirus is mutating — does it matter? When COVID-19 spread around the globe this year, David Montefiori wondered how the deadly virus behind the pandemic might be changing as it passed from person to person.
Montefiori is a virologist who has spent much of his career studying how chance mutations in HIV help it to evade the immune system. The same thing might happen with SARS-CoV-2, he thought. In March, Montefiori, who directs an AIDS-vaccine research laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, contacted Bette Korber, an expert in HIV evolution and a long-time collaborator. Korber, a computational biologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, had already started scouring thousands of coronavirus genetic sequences for mutations that might have changed the virus’s properties as it made its way around the world.
Compared with HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is changing much more slowly as it spreads. But one mutation stood out to Korber. These assertions dismayed many scientists. Slow change Faster spread? The coronavirus is mutating — does it matter? Www.theglobeandmail. James Maskalyk is an emergency physician, associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and author of the forthcoming book Doctor: Heal Thyself.
Dave Courchene is the founder of the Turtle Lodge International Centre for Indigenous Education and Wellness and chair of its National Knowledge Keepers’ Council. If humanity is to endure, the coming months must hold healing, not just of populations across the globe from the coronavirus, but of the Earth herself. As is true of many zoonoses (diseases that jumped from animals), this virus emerged from pressure humans put on a global ecosystem. A lack of healthy, natural habitat weakens the immune systems of animals and the resulting sicknesses pass rapidly through them.
There is good news. This is neither speculation nor fantasy. No one created the problems that threaten to overwhelm us from malice. We have forgotten who we are. We are of the Earth, and have everything we need to heal. Story continues below advertisement. COVID Misinformation Is Killing People. The confluence of misinformation and infectious disease isn’t unique to COVID-19. Misinformation contributed to the spread of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and it plagues efforts to educate the public on the importance of vaccinating against measles.
But when it comes to COVID-19, the pandemic has come to be defined by a tsunami of persistent misinformation to the public on everything from the utility of masks and the efficacy of school closures, to the wisdom behind social distancing, and even the promise of untested remedies. According to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, areas of the country exposed to television programming that downplayed the severity of the pandemic saw greater numbers of cases and deaths—because people didn’t follow public health precautions. A coordinated campaign of influencers supporting science and public health. Detect, understand and expose COVID-19-related misinformation through data science and behavioral analytics. COVIDrallies 10 30 2000. What is Herd Immunity and How Can We Achieve It With COVID-19? - COVID-19 - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. By Gypsyamber D’Souza and David Dowdy | April 10, 2020 When the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 first started to spread, virtually nobody was immune.
Meeting no resistance, the virus spread quickly across communities. Stopping it will require a significant percentage of people to be immune. But how can we get to that point? In this Q&A, Gypsyamber D’Souza, PhD ’07, MPH, MS, and David Dowdy, MD, PhD ’08, ScM ’02, explain that there are two paths to this level of protection—and why the fastest option is not the best one. What is herd immunity? When most of a population is immune to an infectious disease, this provides indirect protection—or herd immunity (also called herd protection)—to those who are not immune to the disease.
For example, if 80% of a population is immune to a virus, four out of every five people who encounter someone with the disease won’t get sick (and won’t spread the disease any further). How have we achieved herd immunity for other infectious diseases? Pre-existing and de novo humoral immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in humans. Immune cells for common cold may recognize SARS-CoV-2. At a Glance A study of blood samples taken before the COVID-19 pandemic showed that some people already had certain immune cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2.
These immune cells also reacted with coronaviruses that cause common colds. The findings suggest that existing immune cells may help account for the wide range of symptoms experienced by people with COVID-19. The virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, is part of a large family of coronaviruses. Coronaviruses usually cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses, like the common cold. However, SARS-CoV-2 can cause serious illness and even death. Your body’s disease defense system, the immune system, makes B and T cells when exposed to pathogens like viruses and bacteria. Once your body fends off a microbe, it retains some disease fighting cells as memory cells. The researchers generated T cell lines from the memory cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2 fragments. —by Tianna Hicklin, Ph.D.
Pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2: the knowns and unknowns | Nature Reviews Immunology. T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 was observed in unexposed people; however, the source and clinical relevance of the reactivity remains unknown. It is speculated that this reflects T cell memory to circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. It will be important to define specificities of these T cells and assess their association with COVID-19 disease severity and vaccine responses.
As data start to accumulate on the detection and characterization of SARS-CoV-2 T cell responses in humans, a surprising finding has been reported: lymphocytes from 20–50% of unexposed donors display significant reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 antigen peptide pools1,2,3,4. In a study by Grifoni et al.1, reactivity was detected in 50% of donor blood samples obtained in the USA between 2015 and 2018, before SARS-CoV-2 appeared in the human population. T cell reactivity was highest against proteins other than the coronavirus spike protein, but T cell reactivity was also detected against spike. Change history. - Company Homepage. Mathematical model of infection kinetics and its analysis for COVID-19, SARS and MERS. Modeling the viral dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Science-Based Medicine | Exploring issues and controversies in the relationship between science and medicine. COVID-19 deniers and a declaration rejecting science – I've seen this before.
COVID-19 deniers are a new species of science denialists that have arisen since our planet was hit with this pandemic. You know the type – masks are evil, closing restaurants will cause the end of humanity, COVID-19 is a plot by liberals, blah blah blah. They have nothing but conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. These people really aren’t much different than climate change, vaccine, evolution, and HIV/AIDS deniers who reject science for their own beliefs. The problem with them is that they make it appear that there is some sort of debate when there isn’t. But it gets worse. Those of us who have been fighting the good fight with scientific skepticism have seen this type of thing many times before. Let’s take a look back into history, so take a seat, get some popcorn, and let’s have some fun.
COVID-19 deniers – the Great Barrington Declaration So what does this pompous declaration say? It appears that they have gotten thousands of signatories, but we’ll get to that later. Become a Patron! Study suggests 1918 flu waves were caused by 'distinct' viruses | CIDRAP. Sep 30, 2011 (CIDRAP News) – A new analysis of influenza outbreak patterns in several navies in 1918 suggests that the first and second waves of the pandemic were caused by "antigenically distinct" viruses, a conclusion that runs counter to some other recent studies that have tried to discern why the second wave was so much more deadly than the first. A team of Australian and American researchers, writing in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, says its analysis suggests that those who were infected in the mild first wave, in the spring or summer of 1918, remained susceptible to infection in the deadly second wave in the fall, but were protected from death.
If this is true, "the two waves of infection were probably caused by antigenically distinct influenza viruses—not by one virus that suddenly increased in pathogenicity between the first and second waves," says the report by G. Dennis Shanks, MD, of the Australian Army Malaria Institute, and colleagues. "As Drs. See also: (PDF) Testing the Efficacy of Homemade Masks: Would They Protect in an Influenza Pandemic? Towel filter and protection factors of between 4.1 and 5.3 for the surgical mask. It was interesting that the study also found that median protection factors increased over the 3-hour period for those wearing the homemade masks, decreased for those wearing filtering face piece (FFP2) masks that lower the wearer’s exposure to airborne particles by a factor of 10, and showed no consistent pattern for those wearing a surgical mask.
The materials used in this published study were fresh and previously unworn. With water vapor, to create a fabric similar to that which has been worn for a couple of hours, would show very different filtration efficiencies and pressure drops. Of breathing system filters found a greater breakthrough of bacteriophage MS2 on filters that had been preconditioned.
Although the droplet sizes for both virus and bacteria were the same and affected the filter media in a similar manner, it was suggested that the viruses, after contact with the moisture cfu/mL, which volunteers. hygiene. Estimation of Individual Probabilities of COVID-19 Infection, Hospitalization, and Death From A County-level Contact of Unknown infection Status | medRxiv. Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech. Abstract Mandates for mask use in public during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, worsened by global shortage of commercial supplies, have led to widespread use of homemade masks and mask alternatives. It is assumed that wearing such masks reduces the likelihood for an infected person to spread the disease, but many of these mask designs have not been tested in practice. We have demonstrated a simple optical measurement method to evaluate the efficacy of masks to reduce the transmission of respiratory droplets during regular speech.
In proof-of-principle studies, we compared a variety of commonly available mask types and observed that some mask types approach the performance of standard surgical masks, while some mask alternatives, such as neck fleece or bandanas, offer very little protection. Our measurement setup is inexpensive and can be built and operated by non-experts, allowing for rapid evaluation of mask performance during speech, sneezing, or coughing. Introduction Results Discussion. Trials Seek to Answer if Vitamin D Could Help in COVID-19. A few years back, respiratory physician Adrian Martineau of Queen Mary University of London and colleagues analyzed data from about 11,000 participants in 25 trials that tested the effect of vitamin D supplementation on the risk of contracting an acute respiratory tract infection such as influenza. They determined that taking a daily or weekly dose of vitamin D was protective against infections and safe overall.
People with the lowest starting vitamin D levels benefitted the most from supplementation. When David Meltzer, an internist and economist at the University of Chicago, saw that analysis earlier this year, he decided to look into a possible connection between vitamin D and COVID-19. There was good reason to do so. Groups who are often low in vitamin D—such as African Americans, who tend to have darker skin in which higher melanin levels limit UV rays from fueling vitamin D production, and the elderly—were being hit especially hard by the disease. Immunity and vitamin D. Visualizing the effectiveness of face masks in obstructing respiratory jets: Physics of Fluids: Vol 32, No 6.
Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients – An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study - EClinicalMedicine. 1. Introduction Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), an illness caused by the novel Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), is an on-going viral pandemic and has spread to the whole world. To date, it has been spreading globally with nearly 4,700,000 active infections and the total death toll was over 560,000 []. As a member of the coronavirus family, SARS-CoV-2 shares a 77.2% amino acid identity, 72.8% sequence identity and structural similarity with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) [ Wu F Zhao S Yu B et al.
A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China. Nature. 2020; 579: 265-269 Brielle ES Schneidman-Duhovny D Linial M The SARS-CoV-2 exerts a distinctive strategy for interacting with the ACE2 human receptor. ]. Desforges M Le Coupanec A Stodola JK Meessen-Pinard M Talbot PJ Human coronaviruses: Viral and cellular factors involved in neuroinvasiveness and neuropathogenesis. Virus Res. 2014; 194: 145-158 ]. ]. Baig AM ]. ]. ].
Selective and cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes in unexposed humans. Children Often Carry More Coronavirus than Adults Do: Study. Short-range airborne route dominates exposure of respiratory infection during close contact. Airborne or Droplet Precautions for Health Workers Treating Coronavirus Disease 2019? | The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Aerosol and surface contamination of SARS-CoV-2 observed in quarantine and isolation care. Hydroxychloroquine with or without Azithromycin in Mild-to-Moderate Covid-19. To mask or not to mask: Modeling the potential for face mask use by the general public to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis - The Lancet. Study Identifies Abnormal Surge of Flu-like Illnesses in March.
New Journal to Publish Reviews of COVID-19 Preprints. Severe Neurological Ailments Reported in COVID-19 Patients. The D614G mutation in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reduces S1 shedding and increases infectivity. Challenges of “Return to Work” in an Ongoing Pandemic. Genomewide Association Study of Severe Covid-19 with Respiratory Failure. s41591 020 0869 5.
The assessment of transmission efficiency and latent infection period on asymptomatic carriers of SARS-CoV-2 infection. 34627c7a5d357487260344f82995aa9bcba1. Main. A Randomized Trial of Hydroxychloroquine as Postexposure Prophylaxis for Covid-19. Remdesivir for 5 or 10 Days in Patients with Severe Covid-19. 302 Found. What's the deal with Masks? Full genome viral sequences inform patterns of SARS-CoV-2 spread into and within Israel | medRxiv. Remdesivir for the Treatment of Covid-19 — Preliminary Report. Early Release - Evidence Supporting Transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 While Presymptomatic or Asymptomatic - Volume 26, Number 7—July 2020. Science News for Students, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine stimulates an immune... You may be able to spread coronavirus just by breathing, new report finds.
Why does SARS-CoV-2 spread so easily? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2): An overview of viral structure and host response. Where Are All the Patients? Addressing Covid-19 Fear to Encourage Sick Patients to Seek Emergency Care | Catalyst non-issue content. Pattern of Early Human-To-Human Transmission of Wuhan 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), December 2019 to January 2020 - PubMed. Home | Erin Bromage PhD: Disease musings.
Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breath and efficacy of face masks | Nature Medicine. 9789241507134 eng. Untitled. Study finds no hydroxychloroquine effect on death, severe COVID-19 | CIDRAP. Observational Study of Hydroxychloroquine in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19. The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them. Judy Mikovits – another false authority on COVID-19 and vaccines. Call for transparency of COVID-19 models. Spike Mutation Pipeline Reveals the Emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2. Coronavirus mutations and vaccines – worse than murder hornets. Coronavirus vaccine race – Operation Warp Speed could be a disaster. Spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Icelandic Population. Facial mask: A necessity to beat COVID-19. New online first articles from JAMA. Turbulent Gas Clouds and Respiratory Pathogen Emissions: Potential Implications for Reducing Transmission of COVID-19 | Infectious Diseases.
2020.03.22.20040758v1. COVID19 slidedeck continuously updated.pdf. | Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2): An Update. Comparative interactomics for virus–human protein–protein interactions: DNA viruses versus RNA viruses. Transmission Potential of SARS-CoV-2 in Viral Shedding Observed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center | medRxiv. Calling Bullshit. COVID forecasting 03252020 4. Covid_19_Protecting_Your_Family_Dr_Dave_Price_3_22_2020. Coronavirus, Hydroxychloroquine, and the Death of Evidence-Based Medicine. Coronavirus (Covid-19) — NEJM. SARS-associated Coronavirus Transmission, United States. Coronavirus: Research, Commentary, and News. The BMJ: leading general medical journal. Research. Education. Comment | The BMJ.
Coronavirus (covid-19): Latest news and resources. Clinical course and risk factors for mortality of adult inpatients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China: a retrospective cohort study - The Lancet. Transmission of the Novel Coronavirus: Early Findings. Mental Health and Coping During COVID-19. Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1. MedRxiv.org - the preprint server for Health Sciences. A SARS-CoV-2-Human Protein-Protein Interaction Map Reveals Drug Targets and Potential Drug-Repurposing.
Coronavirus | Springer Nature | For Researchers | Springer Nature. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Clinical Trial To Assess Antiviral Drug for COVID-19 Launched. Advancing the sharing of research results for the life sciences.