TWiV 159: Flu gets the REDD light

ferretHosts: Vincent RacanielloAlan Dove, and Rich Condit

Vincent, Alan, and Rich review concern over an influenza H5N1 transmission experiment, and a new host defense protein against RNA viruses.

Please help us by taking our listener survey.

[powerpress url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV159.mp3″]

Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV 159 (48 MB .mp3, 80 minutes).

Subscribe to TWiV (free) in iTunes , at the Zune Marketplace, by the RSS feed, by email, or listen on your mobile device with the Microbeworld app.

Links for this episode:

Weekly Science Picks

Rich – Livescribe Smartpen
Alan – Royal Society journal archive
Vincent – Chronic fatigue syndrome and the CDC by Dave Tuller

Listener Pick of the Week

JudiTop 7 in Microbiology

Send your virology questions and comments (email or mp3 file) to twiv@microbe.tv, or call them in to 908-312-0760. You can also post articles that you would like us to discuss at microbeworld.org and tag them with twiv.

4 thoughts on “TWiV 159: Flu gets the REDD light”

  1. That method CIDRAP report is concerned about of making a microorganism more virulent (works for mortality and for transmission, depending on selection criteria) is not news. It has been publicly published to the general public twice before. Without a report of concern, the paper would have passed unnoticed, most likely.

    Alibek published it in Biohazard.
    Laurie Garrett published it. I believe it was in Collapse of Global Public Health.

    Yes. It works. It works well. Nothing to be gained by putting one’s head in the sand.

  2. What about this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21825167 published in August this year. Here they identified the gene (specifically, the activity of NA) responsible for H1N1 transmissibility in ferrets. Although this is in a different – and less dangerous – strain, I don’t remember this kind of media attention revolving around this paper, which essentially deals with the same problem and could be used by hypothetical molecular biologist/bioterrorists. 

    We should now also take bets on what gene(s) it turns out to be.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top