Biological Agents & Infectious Diseases
Ukraine's Efforts to Stop Measles Outbreak Continue as Case Total Increases (
WHO Europe) Measles continues to spread in Ukraine, with new cases now being reported in all oblasts and Kyiv. These cases are the latest in an expanding outbreak that affected over 3000 people and claimed the lives of 5 children and adults in 2017, according to preliminary data. The latest information from other countries in the WHO European Region also indicates a rise in cases, including large measles outbreaks affecting Greece, Italy and Romania.
Go to article
1918 Influenza Virus: 100 Years on, Are We Prepared Against the Next Influenza Pandemic? (
Nature Reviews Microbiology) The 1918 influenza A virus (IAV) pandemic was the first well-documented influenza pandemic of the 20th century, having devastating consequences worldwide, with an estimated death toll of approximately 50 million casualties. The past 3 years have been dramatically marked by the large outbreaks of Ebola, Chikungunya and Zika viruses in various geographical locations, sporadic but persistent human infections with H5N1 and H7N9 influenza viruses in South-East Asia and the widespread H5N2 IAV outbreak in poultry and wild birds in North America. These events highlight and remind us that zoonotic viruses can emerge unexpectedly in nature resulting in the establishment of viral infections with important economic and health burden.
Go to article
Global Health & Security
Government Affairs & National Security
IARPA Awards Contracts to Develop Fun GCAT Biosecurity Tools (
Global Biodefense) The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity this week announced a multi-year research effort to develop new biosecurity tools under the Functional Genomic and Computational Assessment of Threats program. In order to better address biosecurity concerns, the Fun GCAT program intends to develop next-generation computational and bioinformatics tools to improve DNA sequence screening, to augment biodefense capabilities through the characterization of threats based on function, and to advance our understanding of the relative risks posed by unknown nucleic acid sequences.
Go to article
Medicine & Public Health
Questions and Answers About This Year's Flu Season (
New York Times) How bad is this flu season? At the moment, the 2017-2018 flu season is considered "moderately severe." Large numbers of Americans have fallen ill, and every state except Hawaii has reported widespread flu activity. But some regions have been hit harder than others. More important, the number of people hospitalized or dying from flu nationwide is not unusually high. This season is closely paralleling the 2014-2015 season, which was dominated by the same H3N2 flu strain and was also "moderately severe."
Go to article
Fed up with Drug Companies, Hospitals Decide to Start Their Own (
New York Times) For years, hospital executives have expressed frustration when essential drugs like heart medicines have become scarce, or when prices have skyrocketed because investors manipulated the market. Now, some of the country's largest hospital systems are taking an aggressive step to combat the problem: They plan to go into the drug business themselves, in a move that appears to be the first on this scale.
Go to article
Science & Technology
Google Sells A.I. for Building A.I. (Novices Welcome) (
New York Times) Google has been using artificial intelligence to build other artificially intelligent systems for the last several months. Now the company plans to sell this kind of "automated machine learning" technology to other businesses across the globe. On Wednesday, Google introduced a cloud-computing service that it bills as a way to build a so-called computer vision system that suits your particular needs - even if you have little or no experience with the concepts that drive it.
Go to article
How Robot Math and Smartphones Led Researchers to a Drug Discovery Breakthrough (
Scientific American) For us humans, a healthy brain handles all the minute details of bodily motion without demanding conscious attention. Not so for brainless robots--in fact, calculating robotic movement is its own scientific subfield. My colleagues here at the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design have figured out how to apply an algorithm originally designed to help robots move to an entirely different problem: drug discovery. The algorithm has helped unlock a class of molecules known as peptide macrocycles, which have appealing pharmaceutical properties.
Go to article
Evaluating the Promise of Recombinant Transmissible Vaccines (
Vaccine) Transmissible vaccines have the potential to revolutionize infectious disease control by reducing the vaccination effort required to protect a population against a disease. Recent efforts to develop transmissible vaccines focus on recombinant transmissible vaccine designs because they pose reduced risk if intra-host evolution causes the vaccine to revert to its vector form.
Go to article
US Doctors Plan to Treat Cancer Patients Using CRISPR (
MIT Technology Review) The first human test in the US involving the gene-editing tool CRISPR could begin at any time and will employ the DNA cutting technique in a bid to battle deadly cancers. Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania say they will use CRISPR to modify human immune cells so that they become expert cancer killers, according to plans posted this week to a directory of ongoing clinical trials.
Go to article
