monkey's uncle

As we enter flu season, I think that the importance of hand-washing can not be overstated for maintaining health. Here is a (somewhat ugly) flyer published by CDC:

You’d think CDC could hire some graphic designers!
Two things that I think many people don’t appreciate: (1) washing hands with hot soapy water is better than using alcohol-based [...]

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It’s been a while since I last posted about swine flu.  Alas, it is still with us. The most recent data from CDC show that swine flu is still with us and that we should steel ourselves for a heckuva flu season this autumn and winter.  The curve peaks around the middle of June, but [...]

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I have now been asked a perfectly reasonable question that arises from our recent paper on chimpanzee “AIDS” several times (see previous entry). The question is, should we reinvigorate biomedical testing of SIV infection in chimpanzees as a model for HIV?  The simple answer is no. There are several compelling reasons for this.
First, there are the ethical [...]

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Following our recent Nature paper, there has been a flurry of press, some of which I reference in a previous post.  There is a very nice article that gives the back-story of SIV research at Gombe at MinnPost.com. Put this together with Carl Zimmer’s post and you get a good sense for how research unfolds [...]

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A long-anticipated paper (by me anyway!) has finally been published in this week’s issue of Nature.  In this paper, we show that wild chimpanzees living in the Gombe National Park in western Tanzania on the shores of Lake Tanganyika appear to die from AIDS-like illness when infected with the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV).  Many African [...]

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A very interesting epidemiological analysis of the first cases of novel A(H1N1) flu in China was posted on ProMED-mail this morning by Dr. Ji-Ming Chen, Head of the Laboratory of Animal Epidemiological Surveillance, China Animal Health and Epidemiology Center, Qingdao. Dr. Chen notes that all 12 of the cases in China were imported via air travel.  He writes, [...]

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The bad news is that cases of novel 2009 influenza A(H1N1) continue to increase. Data from WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR), Influenza A(H1N1) - update 43 — 23 May 2009:

The good news is that the spread appears to be sub-exponential at this point.  Exponential growth will appear linear on semi-logarithmic axes.  Here I plot the natural logarithms of [...]

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Data from WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR), Influenza A(H1N1) - update 34 — 20 May 2009: 

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Data from WHO Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR), Influenza A(H1N1) – update 33 — 19 May 2009: 

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There is a nice video piece at the New York Times website done by science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.  In it, he makes a number of important points that I have been trying to emphasize in my latest posts on the topic. McNeil is to be congratulated.  This is the kind of reporting we need [...]

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