Avian Influenza and the Pandemic Threat

Effort aims to merge technology from four companies to create the first sticker with all-printed electronics... A plastic temperature-recording sticker that could provide detailed histories of crates of food or bottles of vaccine would be the first to use all-printed electronics components—including memory, logic, and even the battery. The cost per sticker could be only 30 cents or less. {Technology Review, 30 Jan}

Canadian researchers have reported a study in which both young children and middle-aged adults had little evidence of immune protection against swine-origin influenza H3N2 viruses like those that have been reported recently in a dozen US children. {CIDRAP News, 27 Jan}

A Dutch research team has found that an H5N1 avian influenza virus can spread to the central nervous system (CNS) of ferrets via the olfactory mucosa, according to a report in the Journal of Virology. {CIDRAP News, 27 Jan}

Ralph Tripp is the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Vaccine Development in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine. The influenza virus can rapidly evolve from one form to another, complicating the effectiveness of vaccines and antiviral {Infection Control Today, 27 Jan}

Justin Meyer, an MSU graduate student, led a team of researchers, including Devin Dobias, former MSU undergraduate student, that showed how new viruses evolve. Photo by G.L. Kohuth. In the current issue of Science, researchers at Michigan State {Infection Control Today, 26 Jan}

2A danger not to be sneezed at... IN DECEMBER the scientific world was taken aback by an odd request. The American government, in the shape of the country’s National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), called on the world’s two leading scientific journals to censor research. Nature and Science were about to publish studies by researchers who had been tinkering with H5N1 influenza, better known as bird flu, to produce a strain that might be able to pass through the air between people.

Breaking a prolonged silence, the author of one of two controversial studies dealing with mutant H5N1 viruses said today that the virus his team created went airborne to spread among ferrets, but it didn't kill them. {CIDRAP News, 25 Jan}

The commentary discusses H1N1pdm09 sequences and recombination in Egypt H5N1 PB1 and PB2. {Recombinomics, 25 Jan}

The commentary discusses ferret transmission of H5 on a H1N1pdm09 genetic background. {Recombinomics, 25 Jan}

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- The seasonal flu vaccine provides little protection against the novel (swine) H3N2 strain of flu, Canadian researchers say. {United Press International, 27 Jan}