Immunology

Viruses have strategies. They may not be dominated by politics or people who have desire to work in government but they are strategies just the same. Unable to reproduce on their own, viruses replicate by infecting a living organism's cells and getting the cells to make copies of them. Two main options exist for copies of a virus's genetic structure made in the cell: stay in the cell as a template for making even more copies or get packaged as a new virus and leave in an attempt to infect other cells. The stay strategy initially produces copies of the genetic code faster, while the leave…

Johnson  &  Johnson's Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine raised neutralizing antibodies and robustly protected rhesus macaques against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The vaccine uses a common cold virus, called adenovirus serotype 26 (Ad26), to deliver the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into host cells, where it stimulates the body to raise immune responses against the coronavirus. The team have developed a series of vaccine candidates designed to express different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the major target for neutralizing antibodies. In this study,…

Reliable estimates of the mortality from SARS-CoV-2 infection are essential to understanding the COVID-19 epidemic and develop public health interventions, but we don't have them. If you realistically think that China, where the disease originated, only had a relative few deaths while, Brazil, which is both crowded and lacking in health infrastructure, has a fraction of U.S. deaths, you don't understand how disease transmission works. But you should understand how numbers can be manipulated. There is also conspiracy theory that political activists are exaggerating or underestimating the…

A protein in the viruses causing COVID-19 and SARS is almost identical, which means existing FDA-approved drugs, already tested in mice infected with SARS, could improve the outcomes for COVID-19 patients experiencing severe respiratory symptoms. A team of scientists compared the genomes of 24 Betacoronaviruses, including four SARS-CoV-2 viruses, which causes COVID-19. Their genomic comparisons followed by structural analyses found that a small protein that extends across the viral membrane, called envelope protein E, is almost identical in SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS virus (called SARS-CoV-1). A…

In some good news for 2020, it is confirmed that SARS-CoV-2, the 2019 form of coronavirus that has led to worldwide COVID-19 disease, is not transmitted by mosquitoes, so ecologically useless disease vectors like Aedes aegypti, that carry so many other diseases, can't get blame for the spread of this one during the summer season. The World Health Organisation had already said mosquitoes did not transmit it, but they also claimed that it did not spread human-to-human and that China was a reliable source of data, so their credibility is suspect. While their hand-picked epidemiologists may trust…

The American Academy of Pediatrics is a rather reflexive group much of the time, so it seems bold for Pediatrics, the in-house journal for an organization that tried to argue kids should not be allowed to even walk to school until they are age 10, to take the position that children infrequently transmit COVID-19 to each other or to adults and that most schools can and should reopen in August. The authors of the op-ed, including William V. Raszka, Jr., M.D., an associate editor of Pediatrics, note that a handful of studies have reached a consensus on COVID-19 transmission and kids. But the…

Sweden did not lock down during COVID-19 and while aggressive epidemiological models promoted by bloggers wildly overstated the deaths that would occur, by an order of magnitude, it did produce more per capita deaths and greater healthcare demand than seen in countries with earlier, more stringent intervention. Despite derision from countries like England, who were more aggressive in their approach, Sweden actually did fine with its public-health mandates alone.  They fared the same as France, Italy and Spain, which engaged in more totalitarian behavior, including fines for going out,…

A few species of mosquitoes are nothing but carriers of disease, so pesticides were used to wipe them out in much of North America. Worldwide they remain a public health problem and while some ecologists claim a mythical (and scientifically debunked) 'balance of nature' and therefore insist Aedes aegypti might have some benefit, if we turned them extinct we'd have nothing but less  yellow fever, dengue fever, and Zika worldwide, the way we do in the U.S. The lack of deaths due to mosquitoes thanks to science decades ago has given us a modern idyllic view of pest control. Alternatives to…

The flu kills over 600,000 people each year and in 2020 another virus exploded in public health circles for the third time in 17 years; coronavirus. SARS-CoV-2, which causes the COVID-19 disease, has killed nearly 400,000, and given the risk factors it is hard to say how many would have been killed by any respiratory disease, but one question is not philosophical: is this the new normal?  Coronavirus was only discovered as novel in the 1960s, which means it is unclear how long it has been around. It has likely been with us for a long time, since it is in the same family as the common…

A person with Type 2 diabetes is three times more likely to break a bone than a nondiabetic. Since the number of people with diabetes is increasing rapidly in the United States, skeletal fragility in patients with Type 2 diabetes is a growing, but little-known, public health issue. Usually poor bone density is the culprit behind fragile bones, but that is not the case with Type 2 diabetics, who tend to have normal to high bone density. Yet, they still suffer from fractures at an alarming rate. Nobody knows why. In my Bone Biomechanics Lab, we try to understand what is going wrong by looking…