when to destroy the world's last two remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox.
Since 1989, nearly 1, 400 patients 墉 mostly haemophiliacs 墉 have sued after being infected in the 1980s by blood coagulants that were treated not to kill viruses.
but the patients are stuck with the virus. The health ministry says that it will continue to support their treatment.
Business Hepatitis approvals As expected, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved what is only the second drug to directly target the hepatitis C virus. Telaprevir (Incivek),
including viruses, bacteria and fungi some novel that, alone or in combination, might push a bee colony into precipitous decline.
which spreads harmful viruses, continue to take their toll. Annual surveys in the United states show that almost 35%of all colonies die during a typical winter.
and a greater prevalence of several viruses, two of which had not been detected in bees before. Yet despite having a multitude of enemies
At the meeting, Michelle Flenniken, a virologist at the University of California, San francisco, presented evidence that, in honeybees, it can also trigger a general immune response that might ward off a variety of threats.
Endemic in many parts of Africa and South america, the virus that causes the disease has been eradicated in much of Europe and North america.
Bryan Charleston, a foot-and-mouth expert at the UK Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, Surrey which is on the site where the virus leaked in 2007
and his team exposed eight cows to one form of the virus. They then attempted to transmit the virus from these'source'cows to other bovines in a biosecure compound on the Pirbright site,
Previous estimates based on isolation of the virus from infected animals have come up with significantly longer periods of infectivity.
Only a small fraction of these actually had the virus, he says. Neil Ferguson, a mathematical biologist at Imperial College London, says that there has been some debate in the foot
The pathogens include bacteria and viruses that cause smallpox, the plague, anthrax, Ebola and foot-and-mouth disease.
goat and sheep pox viruses. The report was a response to an executive order from US President Barack Obama last year.
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, and they are star players in the chain of events that led to this outbreak.
Other crops undergoing confined field trials include virus-resistant sweet potatoes and drought-resistant maize, he says.
Nature Newsserious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa,
Bats are thought to have been the source of several of the nastiest viruses to jump to humans from animals during the past 40 years,
Researchers hope that by studying how the viruses jump to people they can come up with ways to limit the spread of disease without culling the bats
There is no vaccination to protect against Hendra virus or Nipah virus, the two established species of henipavirus.
We are concerned the solution will be to just kill the bats to control the virus, says Cunningham.
The viruses were thought then to be restricted to Asia and Australasia but in 2008 the team reported finding antibodies to them in Eidolon helvum fruit bats in Ghana, West Africa, indicating that these bats had been infected too1.
The expanded virus range is cause for alarm, says James wood, a veterinary researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK,
which could be infected with the virus. Such huge colonies in residential areas are uncommon in Asia and Australasia.
Cunningham says it's too early to say for sure how many people are infected with the viruses in Ghana.
But the team has found evidence of a'henipa-like'virus in domestic pigs from two villages about 70 kilometres north of Accra.
Nipah virus is known to multiply in pigs, and the species had a key role in a 1999 outbreak in Malaysia that killed more than 100 people.
We spend millions on hunting down new viruses but very little on working out what causes viruses to jump species,
says Andrew Dobson, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton university in New jersey who commends the project's focus.
the transgenic bean uses RNA interference to shut down replication of the virus (K. Bonfim et al.
and similar viruses, says Arag £o, who is a member of CTNBIO but abstained from the decision on the beans.
and neutralize RNA from any invading virus. Herve Vanderschuren, a biotechnologist at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich, adds that plants naturally produce similar RNA snippets to defend themselves from viral attack,
EMBRAPA is already looking to develop other virus-resistant beans, including common black beans and the popular carioca bean.
the absence of the virus, particularly during India's high-transmission season between June and November, is unprecedented.
to reduce their chances of becoming infected with the virus. On 15 december, the company, based in Foster City,
the treatment uses viruses to deliver a healthy version of the gene to patients'liver cells.
Caution urged for mutant flu workwhy would scientists deliberately create a form of the H5n1 avian influenza virus that is probably highly transmissible in humans?
if the virus escaped from the lab. For the scientists who have created the mutated strains of the H5n1 virus,
Surveillance of flu viruses could, they argue, allow health organizations to monitor birds and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic
and enable authorities to act quickly to contain the virus. That claim is meeting with scepticism,
and that it sends a valuable warning about the potential for the virus to spark a human pandemic.
But they caution that virus surveillance systems are ill-equipped to detect such mutations arising in flu viruses.
As such, work on the viruses is unlikely to offer significant, immediate public-health benefits, they say. That tips the balance of risk-benefit assessment in favour of a cautious approach, says Michael Osterholm,
All five mutations have been spotted individually although not together in wild viruses. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have submitted similar work to Nature,
in order to limit the risk that uncontrolled proliferation of such research might lead to accidental or intentional release of similar mutant viruses.
39 flu researchers declared a 60-day pause in the creation of lab mutant strains of the H5n1 avian flu virus. The hiatus,
and what safety measures should be required of labs that handle the virus. The signatories to the statement,
and international organizations to ramp up their funding of efforts to control outbreaks of the H5n1 virus in poultry,
and so give the virus fewer opportunities to evolve into a human pathogen, she says. Other scientists add that it should force governments to rethink existing vaccine technologies,
"In order to even consider the possibility of reducing the animal reservoir of an emerging pandemic virus,
one would need rapid and complete detection of virus in all geographical areas, Osterholm says. Yet surveillance of H5n1 in poultry worldwide is patchy, particularly in poorer countries,
where the virus is prevalent. It is geared also largely towards simply detecting and monitoring outbreaks,
And virus isolates are sequenced often months or years after they are collected hardly the swift turnaround of a pandemic alert system."
Yet pigs are a likely source of a human pandemic H5n1 virus because they are susceptible to both human
and avian viruses, creating opportunities for genetic reassortment in co-infected animals. Fouchier argues that many countries collect more and more-timely,
"Warnings weeks after dangerous viruses have emerged in poultry, or mammals, may be better than no warnings at all.
But even if a candidate pandemic H5n1 virus was detected in poultry, culling flocks to eliminate it would be no mean feat.
it would take at least a decade to stamp out the virus in such countries. The relative ease of making H5n1 transmissible between mammals in the lab should now prompt the world to address these glaring inadequacies in surveillance
other ways that the virus could become transmissible, he says.""It would be very unfortunate
H5n1 is far from being the only flu virus that poses a pandemic threat. But he believes that more extensive genetic surveillance could eventually pay off."
Hepatitis C hopefuls Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-myers squibb of New york city has become the latest company to spend billions on the promise of hepatitis C treatments.
Georgia. Inhibitex's main asset is a compound against hepatitis C that is in phase II trials.
New jersey, which has three treatments for hepatitis C in clinical trials. See go. nature. com/qjoqfn for more on hepatitis C drugs.
Teva rethink Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, the world's largest maker of generic drugs, may shift its focus towards branded medicines after it announced a new chief executive.
Bossart, a microbiologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, works on treatments and vaccines for the Nipah and Hendra viruses,
The virus that causes the disease spreads quickly and would have a devastating effect on the US cattle industry
-and-mouth virus is restricted currently to Plum Island. Both the latest assessment and the review of it by the NAS, expected by June,
including the Nipah Virus, are not currently found in North america, preparedness matters.""We have the methods
See page 289 for more on the flu-virus debate. go. nature. com/pf7bwv20-24 february Marine scientists'responses to the Gulf of mexico oil spill in 2010 are discussed among topics at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt lake city, Utah
But a flu virus that emerges anywhere, at any time, can threaten the entire planet.
lack of data, says Ian Brown, head of avian virology and mammalian influenza at the Animal health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency lab in Weybridge, UK.
Timely global surveillance of animal flu viruses is crucial not just for identifying pandemic threats,
but also for detecting outbreaks, monitoring how viruses are evolving, understanding risk factors that enable them to spread
and pig flu deposited in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information s Influenza Virus Sequence Database between 2003 and 2011.
The analysis covered all subtypes of flu virus, not just H5n1. That s important, says Malik Peiris, a flu virologist and surveillance expert at the University of Hong kong,
because"H5n1 is not the sole pandemic candidate, and low pathogenic viruses are just as likely, if not more likely,
to become pandemic. The number of avian flu sequences deposited in the database skyrocketed between 2003 and 2010,
The older sequences can inform surveillance by showing how the viruses have evolved, says Peiris, but contemporary data are important"for real-time surveillance,
head of the Molecular genetics of RNA VIRUSES lab at the Pasteur institute in Paris. One reason is that many of the virus samples are sequenced in retrospective research studies.
The two agencies responsible for monitoring disease outbreaks in animals the Food and agriculture organization (FAO) of the United nations and the World organisation for Animal health (OIE) stipulate that sequences of potentially zoonotic viruses should be deposited in public databases within 3 months
Surveillance of avian flu viruses is bad, but that of pig viruses is worse. Yet pigs are a serious pandemic risk:
they can be infected co with both human and avian flu strains, which means that they provide ample opportunity for gene swapping and, thereby,
the emergence of pandemic strains such as the 2009 H1n1 pandemic virus. The world is home to some 1 billion domestic pigs, almost half
including one led by virologist Malik Peiris, are compiling one of the world's single largest sources of pig sequences.
The 2009 pandemic H1n1 virus, which is now endemic in pigs, is unusual in that it contains the triple reassortant internal gene (TRIG) cassette,
a highly conserved set of six genes that allows the virus to swap genes with flu viruses from other species much more freely than the seasonal H1n1 that circulated before 2009 (see Pandemic 2009 H1n1 virus gives wings to avian flu).
but"we are noting lots of reassortment between the pandemic virus and endemic swine viruses, says Peiris.
Another pig virus that has the TRIG cassette, H3n2, infected 12 people in the United states in 2011."
"I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg and such reassortments are surely going on worldwide,
globally changing the swine influenza virus landscape, says Peiris.""This certainly is a source of concern for public health.
although Mikovits (known for her now-retracted work linking chronic fatigue syndrome to a virus) still faces a civil suit from the institute.
The virus, which affects cattle and other cloven-hoofed animals, would have devastating consequences for the US cattle industry were it to emerge in domestic herds.
The virus, which is carried also by warthogs and ticks without causing disease, is now endemic in much of Sub-saharan africa,
In 1957, the virus jumped to Portugal after pigs near Lisbon s airport were fed infected human food scraps (the virus particles can survive meat curing processes.
where the virus gained a foothold after being imported from Africa.""It wasn diagnosed t for several months
C. Netherton/OIETHE recent spread of the virus means that the Ukrainian outbreak, now under control after authorities culled 208 pigs
China also risks importing the virus through its growing trade with African nations. Europe s large pig farms are buffered by better biosecurity and hygiene practices.
Pigs can leave virus particles on transport vehicles, for example, exposing whole shipments of uninfected animals.
The pigs food can also carry the virus if it includes contaminated pork products. Swill feeding, in which pigs are fed scraps of human food waste,
Denis Kolbasov, director of the National Research Institute for Veterinary Virology and Microbiology of Russia in Pokrov, says that officials often have little appetite for expensive countermeasures such as widespread culling
so Dixon s lab and others are working to identify which of the virus s 175
researchers could engineer these genes into the genome of a harmless virus to create a vaccine.
Alternatively, identifying and switching off the disease-causing genes in the virus could lead to an attenuated vaccine.
In the longer term, these options offer the best chance of halting the march of the virus,
Swine-flu alert The number of reported cases in an outbreak of H3n2v virus a variant strain of swine flu that can pass from pigs to humans took a sudden spike last week.
and the virus does not seem to transmit between humans. But it is raising eyebrows
3 9 august 2012h5n1 moratorium Researchers should continue a self-imposed moratorium on lab studies that give new properties to the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5n1, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute
achievement that has happened largely under the radar of most of the virology and scientific community, says David Ulaeto,
With the help of ad hoc expert groups, the JAC would approve official repositories of the virus
The committee would also approve all future research on live rinderpest virus to ensure that its benefits outweigh the risks.
and declaring that the remaining virus samples should be destroyed or shipped to approved high-security labs. The approach is modelled on the post-eradication phase of the smallpox campaign
which saw the number of labs holding the virus reduced from 76 in 1976 to just 2 in 1984.
To identify labs that might still hold rinder  pest virus, the FAO carried out extensive literature searches,
By last week, the FAO and OIE had identified some 40 labs."They were surprised a bit at how many laboratories did have virus,
One worrying aspect was that some virus samples were found to be held in facilities that had inadequate biosafety levels.
-and-mouth virus from the Pirbright facility, which houses  a high-biosecurity, world-reference laboratory for both foot
He and others say that the biggest threat is forgotten from long samples of virus from past research programmes,
and consist of live attenuated virus, are also a concern. In theory, they could revert to wild type
Although the virus is closely similar to the human measles virus, for example, cattle don t catch measles
so could provide insight into the pathology and basic biology of viruses, Baron says. Of more immediate interest, investigators would also like to know
whether vaccines can be developed against another related virus, the sheep and goat disease called peste des petits ruminants,
That would eliminate the need to keep any stocks of live attenuated rinderpest virus at all.
Baron s home lab contains more than 100 Â different rinderpest virus isolates, which he says represent"basically the history of the disease.
2012) is authored co by members of two teams that reported associations between XMRV and related viruses and CFS.
Need for flu surveillance reiteratedthe emergence of the H1n1 influenza virus that leapt from pigs to humans in 2009,
and can spread through the air 1."It shows that there are very nasty viruses being generated in swine,
"And these viruses are coming out of apparently healthy pigs. Like that responsible for the 2009 pandemic, the new strain, known as Sw/1204, is a'triple-reassortant'virus that is, one with genes from avian, swine and human flu.
Such viruses, which first appeared in North america in 1998, have been circulating in Korean pigs for at least a decade.
and two H3n2 viruses isolated from pig abattoirs before the 2009 pandemic. Most of these viruses did not cause any signs of serious disease in ferrets.
Sw/1204 was the exception. It replicated in the airways and lungs of three infected ferrets
The virus also spread through the air to infect three healthy ferrets that were housed in cages next to infected ones.
The virus gained two new mutations in its trip between the cages one from aspartic acid to glycine in the haemagglutinin protein (HA225G),
The mutant virus was better at infecting and growing in human lung tissues and airway cells than the parental strain,
The HA225G mutation allows the virus to bind more effectively to receptors in the lungs of its hosts,
the team showed that both contribute to the greater virulence and transmissibility of the virus. Malik Peiris,
a clinical virologist at the University of Hong kong, says the work shows how important it is for changes in haemagglutinin
and neuraminidase to complement each other to maintain a balance in the virus . But these mutations cannot fully account for the deadly nature of the transmitted Sw/1204 viruses.
When Choi added them to another H1n2 strain, they did not increase transmissibility or virulence to the same degree, suggesting that other genetic features of Sw/1204 also play a part.
including chickens engineered to be resistant to the bird-flu virus. A BBSRC spokesperson told Nature:"
Breast-milk molecule raises risk of HIV transmissiona type of sugar that occurs naturally in breast milk can double the likelihood of a HIV-negative baby acquiring the virus through breast feeding
In a study in Zambia, HIV-negative newborns breastfed by HIV-positive mothers are twice as likely to catch the virus during their first month of life
has identified a region on one chromosome that affects levels of virus in the blood during infection5.
and to push forward candidate drugs that include several hepatitis  C antivirals. Stem-cell transfer  Pioneering biotechnology company Geron is shedding its assets in human embryonic stem cells.
and the virus has expanded its geographical range to neighbouring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, as well as Beijing in the north and Henan in the centre of the country.
well-established avian flu virus H5n1 may help to target H7n9 surveillance and control efforts. The map shows human cases of H7n9 (blue circles) superimposed on a risk map developed for H5n1,
scientists must identify the sources of the virus, and the route by which it infects humans.
but tens of thousands of tests in poultry and other animals elsewhere have failed so far to turn up significant levels of the virus. It is far from easy to devise effective ways to sample birds and animals for testing in a country with some 6 billion domestic birds
the H5n1 virus that has caused 622 confirmed cases and 371 deaths since 2003, may help inform analyses.
and an expert in the epidemiology and ecology of avian flu viruses at the Free University of Brussels, says that
Such information could also be used to help to modify farming and trade practices to reduce the risk of human exposure to the virus. As more is learned about H7n9,
T. P. V. B. and M. G.,Universitã Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.)The H7n9 virus has mutations that mean that it spreads from birds to humans more easily than does H5n1.
Proximity between bird and mammal populations could also give the virus opportunities for further adaptation to mammals,
Flight routes from the outbreak regions would quickly carry any human-transmissible virus to huge population centres in Europe, North america and Asia.
or the international spread of a partially or fully human-adapted virus. Maps presented are for data-visualization purposes only;
H7n9 bird flu poised to spreadthe H7n9 avian flu virus greatly expanded its geographical range over the weekend,
Up until now, the virus had been restricted to Shanghai and neighbouring regions on the Eastern seaboard. Experts worry that this new development may be the start of an expansion that may see H7n9 quickly fan out across large areas of China, and beyond.
There is still no evidence of any sustained human-to-human spread of the H7n9 virus
The Beijing Municipal Health Bureau also announced today that a 4-year-old contact of a 7-year-old girl who had been hospitalized with the virus tested positive for the virus too,
it suggests that the virus might be more widespread among humans than the numbers of reported cases suggest.
That is because reduced virulence can often point to further genetic adaptation of the virus to infection of human beings and thus greater potential to spread.
since that virus began causing outbreaks. If that pace keeps up or accelerates, H7n9 could be a significant public health problem
Genetic analyses of the new virus show that it has several mutations making it more adapted to humans than is H5n1.
Concern that the virus would be next to impossible to track or control because it does not cause serious illness in poultry
says Marius Gilbert, an expert in the epidemiology and ecology of avian flu viruses at the Universitã libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
The virus may have reached Beijing and Henan provinces via the poultry trade which is extensive in China,
That could mean that the main reservoir of virus in animals is restricted still to the Shanghai region.
Either mechanism could transport the virus far beyond China's borders. Neighbouring countries need to be on high alert,
and other measures needed to try to prevent the introduction of the virus. Nailing down the transmission routes of the virus in China alone is a huge challenge;
and home to some 6 billion poultry as well as many migratory and other wild birds that may have a role in spreading the virus. On Wednesday,
so long as the virus does not start to spread among humans the potential number of human cases can be curtailed by taking urgent tough measures such as keeping poultry flocks away from wild birds
whether this novel avian influenza virus first reported in humans in China less than two weeks ago will rapidly fizzle out,
or morph into a virus that can spread easily between people and spark a deadly pandemic.
analysing the viruses they find; and trying to trace people who have been exposed to infected patients.
Chinese health authorities say that they have 400 laboratories looking for genetic changes in the virus."We are going to be bated sitting with breath over the next month to find out what happens,
the H7n9 virus was found in chickens, pigeons and ducks in live bird markets in Shanghai and Hangzhou making markets the leading suspected source.
The genetic sequences of the H7n9 viruses found in the birds are highly similar to those isolated from human patients,
says Chao-Tan Guo, a virologist at the Zhejiang Academy of Medical sciences in Hangzhou. Although the virus might have come from other sources
including mammals, the pattern of many human cases over a wide area in a short time could be explained by live markets alone,
says Malik Peiris, a flu virologist at the University of Hong kong. Sources: WHO/ECDC/Xinhua state mediabut the various bird species found to be infected may not be the original source,
Researchers know that H7 flu viruses mainly infect wild birds such as ducks, geese, waders and gulls,
But this H7n9 virus has not yet been detected in wild birds in the area.""There is very little specific information on the source of this particular virus strain, its ecology or reservoir,
and it is premature to be hypothesizing on the vectors, says Taej Mundkur, who is flyways programme manager for conservation group Wetlands International in The netherlands.
Wherever the virus originated, a crucial question is whether it could become established in poultry,
says Masato Tashiro, a virologist at the Influenza Virus Research center in Tokyo, the World health organization s influenza reference
Each time the virus encounters new human hosts, it has fresh opportunities to mutate and to acquire the ability to spread between people.
Researchers working on the molecular biology of the virus say that it seems to derive from a reassortment of genetic material from at least three known bird-flu groups (see Nature http//doi. org/k4j;
) A key component the haemagglutinin (H) protein on the surface of the virus already contains mutations known to shift its binding preference from bird cells to those of mammals.
Because flu viruses evolve rapidly, comparing viral sequences from each of the human cases might reveal
but virologists are sequencing more and posting them on the GISAID flu database. If human-to-human transmission does start to occur,
Humanity has never been exposed widely to H7 or N9 flu viruses, and so lacks resistance to these subtypes.
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