The Scientist spoke with the UK’s chief veterinary officer, Christine Middlemiss, about this winter’s high bird flu prevalence, the effects of the disease, and efforts to combat it.
Dozens of researchers, including myself, worked for years to uncover that swine flu had leapt to humans from a pig in Mexico in 2009. We learned a lot about influenza evolution, pig farming, and outbreak risk along the way.
The Scientist Creative Services Team | Jul 13, 2021
Richard Webby and Edward Hutchinson discuss influenza viruses—the development of new strains, how they mediate virulence, and their threat to human society.
Seven years of surveillance and research revealed the complex history of the H1N1 virus that leapt from pigs to humans and sparked the global swine flu outbreak.
Sherif Zaki worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more than 30 years, and was renowned for uncovering crucial intel on various outbreak-causing scourges, from Ebola and Zika to SARS and influenza.
The Scientist Creative Services Team in collaboration with 10x Genomics | Feb 17, 2021
Paul Thomas from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital will discuss how he used single cell and spatial transcriptomics to discover the underlying mechanism of an inflammatory immune response in the lungs.
Epidemiological research suggests that a flu diagnosis might be one factor in the eventual onset of the neurodegenerative disease, but experts say it doesn’t prove a causal relationship.
Dozens of researchers, including myself, worked for years to uncover that swine flu had leapt to humans from a pig in Mexico in 2009. We learned a lot about influenza evolution, pig farming, and outbreak risk along the way.
Although scientists debate the ethics of deliberately infecting volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, plenty of consenting participants have been exposed to all sorts of pathogens in prior trials.
Lab and field experiments indicate that aquatic environments could act as reservoirs for the pathogens, which typically do not represent a direct risk to humans.
A handful of factors tip the scales in making a virus more likely to trigger a disruptive global outbreak. Right now, scientists tend to rank influenza, coronaviruses, and Nipah virus as the biggest threats.