Declan Butler’s interview with Indonesia’s health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari
Nature’s senior correspondent, Declan Butler, was one of the first to raise the profile of a pandemic threat in the scientific community and has had done some superb reporting since, including several...
View ArticleNow I’m the one complaining about WHO (again)
After spending more time than I wished “defending” WHO against what I considered a particular kind of scurrilous attack (it also seemed to raise the hackles of some unintended as targets, but the...
View ArticleTamiflu resistance in seasonal flu: the devil is in the details
Since the antiviral agent oseltamivir (Tamiflu) has been touted as the global savior should a bird flu pandemic materialize the idea has been haunted by the specter of Tamiflu resistance. What if H5N1...
View ArticleBird flu: Bangladesh behaving badly
Bangladesh is a country with more than its share of woes. Now there is H5N1 galloping through its poultry. Bangladesh needs all the help it can get. Which also means it needs to help others, too. How...
View ArticleIndonesian virus sharing by the book
Indonesia is providing bird flu specimens to WHO again. And Indonesian Health Minister Dr Siti Fadilah Supari has just published a book declaring the 50 year plus history of global influenza...
View ArticleNaming a bird flu virus
For years we have been naming flu viruses in a particular way. Now Declan Butler has a news article in Nature observing that the system is being modified for bird flu to be more “politically correct.”...
View ArticleBad behavior in the world of flu science
Last week WHO’s flu maven, Keiji Fukuda, said what we and others have been saying for a long time. Flu scientists need to change their research ethics. The world of flu virology has developed a...
View ArticleMolecular history of the HIV whirlwind
Scientists have been using genetic data to estimate when species first appeared for some time. The basic idea is to use differences between species and a guess as to how fast sequences change as a...
View ArticleWHO behaving badly (again)
An article in The Straits Times from newswire Associated Press (AP) drew my attention to a festering disagreement between proponents of an innovative global sharing initiative for influenza information...
View ArticleTrying to understand the Norwegian swine flu mutations [with Addendum]
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is reporting sporadic occurrences of a mutation in a portion of the flu virus that is involved with the process by which it attaches to cells. I use the word...
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