The current H1N1 influenza A swine flu strain has genetic roots in an illness that sickened pigs at the 1918 Cedar Rapids Swine Show in Iowa, report infectious disease experts at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health in the New England Journal of Medicine. Their paper, published online today, describes H1N1's nearly century-long and often convoluted journey, which may include the accidental resurrection of an extinct strain.

A team of scientists led by chemist and Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Pioneer laureate Piet Gros and medical microbiologist Jos van Strijp from Utrecht University have succeeded in 'freezing' a chain reaction of the immune system and they're calling it a breakthrough in the field of immunology.

One of the oldest defense mechanisms of our body is the complement system. Unlike white blood cells, which must learn to recognize pathogens, the complement system works from birth onwards. The system consists of proteins that initiate a chain reaction to kill bacteria and damaged cells. However the system is not perfect; it can run wild and attack our own healthy cells.

In England and Wales, the national health statistics in 2007 showed that there were 8,324 death certificates which named Clostridium difficile. This is a bacterium which causes severe diarrhea in humans and animals as the underlying cause of death, a 28% increase from 2006.

Now Janet Nale of the Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation is investigating the contributing factors that make Clostridium difficile so aggressive to direct treatment. 

Nale said: “Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and some can completely change the behaviour of their host bacteria, or affect its ability to cause disease. In some cases, bacteriophages have been shown to convert a mild strain to a severe one.

One odd characteristic of H1N1 influenza A (swine flu) in 2009 is that it seems to hit children much harder than the elderly, an about-face from ordinary flu.   So targeting children may be an effective use of limited supplies of flu vaccine, according to research at the University of Warwick funded by the Wellcome Trust and the EU. The study suggests that, used to support other control measures, this could help control the spread of pandemics such as the current swine flu.

Fire drills are conducted to know what it will be like in an actual fire incident. The main objective of fire drills are to asses how fast can people evacuate the buildings safely, if ever they catch fire.

I think the swine flu virus is just like that. It is not as deadly as the Ebola Zaire, which are known cause 90% fatalities, nor as resilient as HIV, but the fact that it is a flu virus makes it as valuable as a fire drill - a life saving drill . We now know how fast a flu or at least a flu-like virus can be transmitted. In Canada earlier this month, 265 cases have been reported in just 72 hours. Cases have been confirmed for 75 countries world wide. And here in the Philippines, cases rose to 193.

Are parasites evolving to be more or less aggressive depending on whether they are closely connected to their hosts or scattered among more isolated clusters of hosts?  Research led by Geoff Wild, an NSERC-funded mathematician at the University of Western Ontario, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh.

They decided to move the arguments from words to harder science and developed a formal mathematical model that incorporated variable patch sizes and the host parasite population dynamics. It was then run to determine the underlying evolutionary mechanisms. 

The secret to any good recipe is knowing how things happen in a system and the recipe for diseases is no different.  Many diseases have crucial proteins which change the dynamics of cells from benign to deadly. New findings from an international collaboration involving McGill University, the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) just made identifying these changes one step easier. Their findings published in Nature Methods, show how to improve protein analysis to tease out relevant potential disease-causing molecules.

Since April 15 and 17, 2009, when the first two cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) infection were identified from two southern California counties, novel influenza A (H1N1) cases have been documented throughout the world, with most cases occurring in the United States and Mexico.

In the United States, early reports of illnesses associated with novel influenza A (H1N1) infection indicated the disease might be similar in severity to seasonal influenza, with the majority of patients not requiring hospitalization and only rare deaths reported, generally in persons with underlying medical conditions.

Avian influenza viruses do not thrive in humans because the temperature inside a person's nose is too low, according to research published today in PLoS Pathogens. The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and the University of North Carolina, say this may be one of the reasons why bird flu viruses do not cause pandemics in humans easily.

There are 16 subtypes of avian influenza and some can mutate into forms that can infect humans, by swapping proteins on their surface with proteins from human influenza viruses.

Recently I had the opportunity to ask Paul Ewald, one of the nation's leading evolutionary biologists, about a subject near and dear to his heart: the evolution of a bug, specifically swine flu. As usual, Ewald, a professor of biology at the University of Louisville, was lucid, cogent and memorable.

In his 2002 book, Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease, Ewald set the bio-med community on its head by arguing that most chronic disease is caused by sub-acute levels of pathogenic origin, rather than genes.

The death toll due to malaria outbreaks has reached over million lives every year with an additional 300-500 million people suffering illness from serious malaria infections. The growing pandemic and high mortality rate has caused renewed and fervent interest in creating an effective vaccine treatment for the prevention of malaria.

This interest has sparked physicians, scientists and pharmaceutical companies alike to race for the most cost-effective, efficient and overall viable vaccine against malaria.  There are currently multiple vaccines in various stages of trial and with various ranges of efficacy.

When it comes to immunity, men may not have been dealt an equal hand. The latest study by Dr. Maya Saleh, of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre and McGill University, shows that women have a more powerful immune system than men. In fact, the production of estrogen by females could have a beneficial effect on the innate inflammatory response against bacterial pathogens. The results were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

'Drought-proofing' Australia's urban regions by installing large domestic water tanks may enable the dengue mosquito Aedes aegypti to regain its foothold across the country and expand its range of possible infections, according to a new study published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. 

Dr Nigel Beebe and colleagues from the University of Queensland, CSIRO Entomology, the Australian Army Malaria Institute, and the Communicable Diseases Branch of Queensland Health, Brisbane, challenge the common assumption that climate change will drive the spread of this mosquito. 

Narcolepsy affects about one in 2,000 people and is characterized by daytime drowsiness, irregular sleep at night and cataplexy — a sudden loss of muscle tone and strength. Stanford University School of Medicine scientist Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, and others showed in the late 1990s that the disease stems from a lack of hypocretin, a hormone that promotes wakefulness; they later showed that narcoleptics are missing brain cells that produce this hormone.

 Now Mignot and collaborators say that a specific immune cell is involved in the disorder — adding evidence that narcolepsy may be an autoimmune disease.

 Everyone is blaming H1N1, but could a different strain of Influenza be the cause of Mexican deaths?

A new study by University of Maryland researchers suggests that the potential for an avian influenza virus to cause a human flu pandemic is greater than previously thought and the results also illustrate how the current H1N1 swine flu outbreak likely came about. 

People who want to take extra precautions against swine flu should look for masks with built-in filters, according to Dr Robin J Harman, a pharmaceutical and regulatory expert.

There has been much debate about the benefits of wearing a mask to prevent infection with swine flu. Ordinary surgical masks provide some protection from airborne particles, but the UK Department of Health has stated that 'basic face masks don't protect people from becoming infected'.(1)

A French study of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which analysed mortality rates in approximately three-quarters of the European population, has concluded that it is unlikely that the virus, often described as Spanish Flu, originated in Europe.

Published in the May issue of Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, the research shows a high degree of synchronicity in the 14 countries studied, including Spain, with the flu peaking in October to November 1918.

The study, carried out by a team from INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, provides invaluable background briefing for clinicians and media during the current pandemic alert.

Key facts highlighted by the research – which can be viewed free online - include:

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so that they could assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus might emerge and determine how dangerous it would be.

Their reasoning was that the worst fears of infectious disease experts - that the H5N1 avian influenza virus  circulating in parts of Asia might combine with a human-adapted flu virus, namely if someone with a flu virus also contracted the avian virus - might result in a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.   A pandemic of the kind not seen in almost a hundred years.

On April 21, 2009, CDC reported that two recent cases of febrile respiratory illness in children in southern California had been caused by infection with genetically similar swine influenza A (H1N1) viruses. The swine flu viruses contained a unique combination of gene segments that had not been reported previously among swine or human influenza viruses in the United States or elsewhere (1).

Neither child had known contact with pigs, resulting in concern that human-to-human transmission might have occurred.