Common Cold is Happier in a Cold Nose

It appears that you should have listened to your grandma when she told you to wear the oversized hat and scarf that she had taken the time to weave for you. Believers of old folk wisdom now have scientific evidence to support the idea that cold weather makes people more susceptible to the common cold. For years, the scientific community knew that rhinoviruses replicate better in the nose than other parts of the body and a recent study suggested the mechanism responsible for this phenomenon. 

A study conducted at the Yale university found a correlation between the temperature in the nose and the strength of the innate immune response against the infection that causes the common cold. The researchers examined rhinoviruses, the most common viral infective agents that cause the common cold. They discovered that the epithelial cells in the airway secrete more RID-I-like receptor (RLR)-dependent interferons and an overall higher antiviral defense response at the temperature of 37 degrees Celsius than at 33 degrees Celsius. This evidence of temperature dependent Interferon induction suggests that the reason why rhinoviruses prefer to live in the nose is that the nose has a temperature from 33 to 35 degrees Celsius, while the lungs have a temperature of 37 degrees Celsius. 

With the seasonal rise in the number of common cold cases, the results of this study are useful. The results suggest that those seeking to protect themselves against the common cold or reduce the symptoms should keep their noses warm. Dr. Iwasaki, the principal investigator of the study, indicated, “You can always stay in warm tropical weather or try to prevent the nasal cavity experiencing very cold air.”

By Mariam

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30685732

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/02/1411030112

Book Review: the Hot Zone by Richard Preston

“Hot (Military Slang.): Lethally Infective in a biological sense.” (Preston 418)

"Hot agent: Extremely lethal virus. Potentially airborne.” (Preston 418)

These two definitions taken from Richard Preston’s the Hot Zone convey the urgent and serious tone which Preston uses to describe his topic: Ebolaviruses and Marburg virus of the Filoviridae family. In his non fiction book, he uses a combination of anecdotes of patients’ experiences and facts about the viruses to recount the history of Ebola viruses and depict a general overview of the Filovirus family. Richard Preston starts the book with an account of Charles Monet’s Marburg infection and subsequent outbreak in 1980. He takes us on the journey that Monet went on to and from Kitum Cave in Mount Elgon, he makes the reader apprehensive about the possibility of transmission to those he is around on the plane, the medical staff at the hospital. He describes the progression of his illness with vivid imagery: “He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in the brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Monet has already died while the what continues to live.” Furthermore he appeals to the readers’ emotions and stomachs when he describes how Monet’s internal organs fail and he bleeds out from all body parts. 

By starting out with an account of the Marburg illness and not giving the reader the facts about Filoviruses, he builds up the suspense and piques the interest in finding out the details about Filoviruses: their route of transmission, their origins, their level of infectiousness. If the reader had no prior knowledge about Marburg when he started reading the book, he would become a detective alongside the author trying to figure out what this disease is. 

A very thrilling part of the book describes Nancy Jaax, ’s encounter with Ebola. After grabbing the reader’s attention with the story of Charles Monet’s illness and subsequent death, he transitions to Thurmont Maryland 1983 and follows the experience of Major Nancy Jaax, a veterinarian with Ebola. What makes the book more appealing to the mass audience is partly the fact that Preston throws in some details about personal lives of the characters and doesn’t just state the facts of the viruses. He interweaves details about Ebola with descriptions of how Nancy always cooked in the house, gave her children baths, lived in a Victorian house, and was married to another veterinarian. These details make her personable and make the readers more concerned when they read about the fact that when she is working with a dead monkey with Ebola, her glove tear. She has a cut on her hand from making dinner the day before and is exposed to the virus. Fortunately she doesn’t have the virus, but he spends several pages accentuating her fears and her apprehensions. 

He goes on to describe Ebola: its classification, appearance, symptoms, etc. He repeatedly says that the knowledge of the properties of Ebola in the scientific community needs to be substantially improved. He describes the history of the Filoviridae virus family and contemplates the origins of AIDS. He devotes several pages to describing the several Biosafety levels and the dangerous implications of Ebola’s classification as a Biosafety level 4 virus. He describes the Ebola Sudan and Ebola Zaire strains and writes about the discovery of the Reston strain and the involvement of the US Army and Centers for Disease Control in its containment. He writes about the eruption of the Ebola virus in a monkey house near the CDC. 

The book ends on a forbearing tone. In the last pages he indicates the fast mutation rate of the AIDS virus and the lack of vaccines for it. Furthermore he conveys the point that while the AIDS virus was disregarded as a minor concern for a minority population of homosexuals in California when it first appeared, it soon progressed to play a major part in society alarming the medical community. He thus compares AIDS to Ebola, not only because they serve as the “revenge of the rain forest,” but also because they have underdog features. At the time of the novel’s publication, Ebola was being ignored by a large part of the world due to the fact that it had at the time of the novel only infected people in West Africa. He states that "AIDS might not be Nature’s preeminent display of power implying that the readers should anticipate something stronger and more dangerous. After discussing AIDS, he travels to the abandoned monkey house in Reston and concludes the book here: “Ebola had risen in these rooms, flashed its colors, fed, and subsided into the forest. It will be back. 

His book serves not just as an interesting informant of the history of Filoviruses but rather as a call to action to the medical community and society in general to enhance research, create effective treatments, and design better ways to combat Ebola when it gets out of the Kitum Cave or some other secluded place again. 

By Mariam Kyarunts

(also posted on amazon.com )

Happy Chikungunya Year 

While Chikungunya has been appearing in the news often during Fall 2014 because of the numerous cases in the US, it gained increasing popularity in the beginning of the new year because Lindsay Lohan contracted the disease in French Polynesia and used social media to inform her fans of this fact. It seems that nowadays, a virus’ claim to fame is through the world of entertainment. An advice to viruses that want to be made known worldwide is to infect a celebrity who has millions of Instagram followers. Lohan herself has 2.5 million followers. Numerous articles were written about Lohan’s infection, including an article in the celebrity section of New York Times. Lindsay Lohan posted empowering messages such as “I refuse to let a virus affect my peaceful vacation."

Many articles have been published about the virus recently because of the end of year assessments of its damage in the Americas, the Carribean.  Whereas previously Chikungunya infection was limited to Asia and Africa, the virus appeared for the first time in the Western Hemisphere in December 2013 when several cases were reported. In the year 2014, more than a million cases were reported in the Western Hemisphere and more than two thousand cases were recorded in the US. Many predict huge outbreaks in 2015 in Florida due to it being a state visited by many people from the Caribbean and Central America. Numerous have indicated that the virus has gained a toehold in the US foreshadowing a dim Chikungunya filled future.

By Mariam Kyarunts

http://time.com/3651313/lindsay-lohan-chikungunya-virus/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/01/01/374198141/painful-virus-sweeps-central-america-gains-a-toehold-in-u-s

UN Launches App #ISurvivedEbola 

UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency is working on the campaign called #ISurvivedEbola, which entails encouraging people in the three West African Ebola afflicted countries to share their experiences. The platform for the sharing is a mobile application, on which survivors are able to post videos, pictures, and testimonies about Ebola. Due to the generous funding of $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s foundation towards Ebola counteraction efforts, those working on the project are able to give smartphones to people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to give them the opportunity to share their Ebola stories. The aim of the campaign is to not just inform the viewers of the egregious experiences which those inflicted with Ebola have been through, but to elicit empathy by bringing Ebola to them through allowing them to experience it vicariously.

By Mariam 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/isurvivedebola-un-launches-app-fight-virus-stigma-n279426

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/04/ebola-survivors-west-africa-mobile-app-stories-outbreak

Influenza now at epidemic levels

At the close of the year, the CDC reported that deaths due to influenza and pneumonia have reached epidemic levels in the U.S.  837 flu and pneumonia deaths were reported in the 2nd to last week of the year, or 6.8% - the epidemic threshold - of total deaths reported that week.  The states most heavily hit by the epidemic include Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, which collectively reported 151 deaths.  However, flu activity is widespread across the nation, with 36 states reporting high flu activity levels.

Luckily, in California, flu activity has only been reported as "sporadic", though 28 deaths were reported in Los Angeles alone.  Meanwhile, in San Francisco, 8 deaths were reported.  Like most flu seasons, the highest risk group are seniors and children under the age of 5, which saw hospitalization rates of 38.3 and 13.4 per 100,000, respectively, compared to the average of 9.7 per 100,000 Americans.  Most of these hospitalizations (~95%) are due to an H3N2 strain (A/Switzerland/9715293/2013) of influenza that is currently not protected against by this year's flu vaccination.  Still, those infected can be treated with antivirals such as Tamiflu and Relenza to decrease the severity of their illness.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-flu-season-epidemic-20141230-story.html

--Andrew Duong

New Position at the CDC: Lab Safety Chief

Due to several “safety lapses” with dangerous pathogens at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the organizations’ administration has created a new safety chief position in November. As of January 1st, the position is still “under recruitment.” According to a CDC spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds, the CDC wants to recruit someone who is able to identify and solve the existing problems with the safety in the agency’s labs and design ways to make the labs for “accountable for follow-up.” This action was prompted by several events in the last year. On December 23, a technician was exposed to the Ebola virus when he was processing it, in March the CDC sent a deadly strain of avian flu to a U.S. Department of Agriculture Laboratory that was supposed to be inactivated, and in June the anthrax virus was “mishandled” causing exposure of more than 80 workers to the virus. These news have galvanized a lot of criticism towards the organization to which the nation looks up to for protecting us from the same pathogens that it’s failing to protect its workers from. The new lab safety chief will have the important role of not only improving the safety measures and expanding biosafety training, but also assuring the nation of CDC’s strength, stability, and reliability. Is hiring one person really enough to fulfill this task?

From my personal experience of working in a lab, I know that all it takes to get bio-safety training is to watch several video modules and pass a quiz on the Stanford Axess training site. The system has loopholes in that it allows the viewer to go to the end of the video without watching all of it and then guessing at the end. The answers to the questions often seem logical and even obvious, so one doesn’t need to be knowledgeable about the details of handling dangerous pathogens in order to pass the training. I don’t know how the lab workers are trained at the CDC to handle the pathogens, but these “safety lapses” in the CDC suggest that perhaps more drastic changes need to happen at the structural level. Perhaps the CDC’s hiring of a new safety chief serves as a distraction to the real problem at hand: the issue of many worker’s unpreparedness to deal with these pathogens and lack of attention paid to the potential for disaster.

~ Mariam Kyarunts

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-31/bungling-of-cdc-virus-samples-prompts-hiring-of-lab-safety-chief.html

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-health-ebola-usa-cdc-idUKKBN0K908E20141231

A Previously Unknown Virus Identified as Bourbon Virus in Kansas

It is an exciting time for infectious diseases experts in the United states, particularly for those in Kansas, due to the identification of a new virus! A microbe was discovered in Bourbon county, Kansas where it infected and killed a farmer last summer. After a meticulous process that lasted several months, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, identified it as a previously unknown virus and consequently named it the Bourbon virus. 

It’s classified under the genus Thogotovirus in the virus family Orthomyxoviridae. The virus acts fast: the infected man died after ten days of the infection. The man presented to the hospital with a symptoms that included high fever, muscle aches and loss of appetite and progressed to lung and kidney failure. Tests indicated that a high number of liver enzymes and a low number of platelets and white cells. Scientists ran tests for the Rocky Mountain spotted fever and the Heartland virus, but the test results were negative. The virus is thought to be transmitted by ticks or mosquitoes, but more research needs to be done to identify the exact route of transmission. Scientists at the CDC suspect that the virus has been around for some time and has infected others even though no other cases have been identified. Scientists have a lot of work cut out for them as they have to investigate potential previous infections by testing blood samples from people who had similar unidentifiable illnesses. 

Should we be worried about this? Right now the risk of infection is low due to the fact that ticks aren’t active in cold whether. However just to be safe, it’s important to use insect repellent when outdoors. Read the article below to learn more about the virus and stay tuned for more information during this exciting time of new virus identification!

Hope you ate many Bo(ur)-bon chocolates during the break!

Your Bourbonophobe,

Mariam

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/science/mysterious-virus-that-killed-a-farmer-in-kansas-is-identified.html?_r=0