Thanks to longstanding negligence, the only way some Americans will get a flu vaccination this season is if they’re
prisoners or win an inoculation
lottery. Bad enough you should get this year’s flu. But how to do you protect against a strain that 86 years ago killed the equivalent of modern Spain’s entire population? You don’t. And that’s put some observers a tad on edge.
Experts fear escape of 1918 flu from lab
The 1918 flu virus spread across the world in three months and killed at least 40 million people. If it escaped from a lab today, the death toll could be far higher. “The potential implications of an infected lab worker – and spread beyond the lab – are terrifying,” says D. A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading biosecurity expert.
Yet despite the danger, researchers in the US are working with reconstructed versions of the virus at less than the maximum level of containment. Many other experts are worried about the risks. “All the virologists I have spoken to have concerns,” says Ingegerd Kallings of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control in Stockholm, who helped set laboratory safety standards for the World Health Organization.
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Hybrid automobiles are so much the rage that the waiting list in some cities “is longer than the waiting list to get an organ transplant," says Carl Pope of the Sierra Club. But scientists at the
Imperial College London have concluded that all of us queued up for a new Prius (as well as those in line for Navigators and Ferraris) are already riding around in a hybrid: our bodies.
According to
the paper these guys published in
Nature Biotechnology this month:
Understanding the workings of the superorganism, [the Imperial College London scientists] say, is crucial to the development of personalized medicine and health care in the future because individuals can have very different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial fauna.
The scientists concentrated on bacteria. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too. …
"We have known for some time that many diseases are influenced by a variety of factors, including both genetics and environment, but the concept of this superorganism could have a huge impact on our understanding of disease processes," said Jeremy Nicholson, a professor of biological chemistry at Imperial College and leader of the study. He believes the approach could apply to research on insulin-resistance, heart disease, some cancers and perhaps even some neurological diseases.
Following the sequencing of the human genome, scientists quickly saw that the next step would be to show how human genes interact with environmental factors to influence the risk of developing disease, the aging process and drug action. But because environmental factors include the gene products of trillions of bacteria in the gut, they get very complex indeed. The information in the human genome itself, 3 billion base pairs long, does not help reduce the complexity.
"The human genome provides only scant information. The discovery of how microbes in the gut can influence the body's responses to disease means that we now need more research into this area," said Nicholson. "Understanding these interactions will extend human biology and medicine well beyond the human genome and help elucidate novel types of gene-environment interactions, with this knowledge ultimately leading to new approaches to the treatment of disease."
Nicholson's colleague, professor Ian Wilson from Astra Zeneca, believes the "human super-organism" concept "could have a huge impact on how we develop drugs, as individuals can have very different responses to drug metabolism and toxicity."
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Republicans who claim the U.S. is swimming in litigation no doubt were happy to hear the latest news from the Circuit Court they love to hate:
Whales have no standing to sue in court
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court decided Wednesday that marine mammals have no standing to sue to stop the U.S. Navy from using sonar.
In upholding a lower court decision, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the world's cetaceans — whales, porpoises and dolphins — have no standing under the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act or the National Environmental Policy Act.
If lawmakers "intended to take the extraordinary step of authorizing animals as well as people and legal entities to sue, they could, and should, have said so plainly," said Judge William A. Fletcher, writing for the panel.
Yeah, OK, but surely they won’t let them get out of jury duty?