A nurse who cared for an Ebola patient repatriated to a Madrid hospital has contracted the disease, the Spanish health ministry announced on 6 October. The news is unfortunately not surprising, however. Read more
The stalemate continues over the question of when to destroy the last stocks of the virus that causes smallpox, a killer disease that was eradicated in 1980. One of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) two advisory committees on smallpox supports their destruction, while the other opposes this. Last weekend, health ministers of the WHO’s 194 member states again postponed a decision, and decided to set up a third WHO smallpox advisory committee in a bid to broker a consensus. Read more
The H10N8 avian flu strain, first detected in humans in a 73-year old woman in Eastern China this month, appears to pose little immediate risk to people, despite her death, preliminary information has shown. The sequence of the virus has not yet been published, but Nature has learned that the haemagglutinin surface protein shows none of the worrysome amino acid changes that typically would allow the virus to infect humans. This means that, unlike H7N9, which is behind a current fatal flu outbreak in southern Guangdong province, the virus cannot easily jump from poultry or other birds to humans. Read more
The Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where researchers led by Ron Fouchier created mammalian-transmissible strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus this week appealed a September court ruling obliging it to request an export permit before submitting such research for publication. Read more
The researcher who created mammalian-transmissible strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus, raising fears they could cause a pandemic, has failed in an attempt to overcome government restrictions on the publication of his papers. See Nature News Mutant Flu special … Read more
The case for a link between a vaccine used during the 2009 H1NI ‘swine flu’ pandemic to a serious sleeping disorder known as narcolepsy was bolstered by a study published this evening. Read more
This weekend, the Internet world mourned one of its heroes, Aaron Swartz, 26, a prodigy, programmer and well-known Internet activist, who hung himself in his New York apartment on Friday. Swartz was to face an imminent trial for having downloaded some 4 million articles from JSTOR, a not-for-profit scholarly archive, from the MIT campus which hosts the archive. He faced extraordinarily severe charges – see here and here – carrying a possible penalty of 35 years in prison, and over $1 million dollars in fines. Swartz was reported to suffer from serious depression, but some including his immediate family have explicitly alleged that the pending charges contributed to his suicide. (Serious depression is more common than one might think – see “Global survey reveals impact of disability.”) … Read more
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) today made public almost all supporting documents and data submitted by Monsanto for the authorisation in 2003 of its genetically modified maize NK603. The data was released alongside the announcement by EFSA that it intends to embark on a broad transparency initiative designed to make data from its risks assessments more available to the broad scientific community and other interested parties. Read more
The World Health Organization (WHO) this afternoon reported four new lab-confirmed cases of a novel coronavirus infection bringing the total number of cases identified since June to six. Two of the cases are from the same household, raising the possibility of human-to-human transmission of the virus, although it’s also possible that they both contracted it independently from an animal source in the area. Three of the new cases occurred in Saudi Arabia, including one who died, while a fourth case was reported in Qatar. The WHO gave few further details of the cases, such as their age or sex, or their current medical condition. Read more
It appears that the Affordable Medicines Facility – Malaria (AMF-m) is being scuttled by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The AMF-m is a multimillion dollar programme to get effective drugs – artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) – to remote rural villages where the local store is often the main provider of medicines. Read more
About this blog
Archived newsblog. Breaking news from the world of science, brought to you by Nature’s news team.
The report produced by the investigators does not say so explicitly, probably out of fear of prejudicing future criminal/civil inquiries,… ... Read more
Recent comments on this blog
Experiments reveal that crabs and lobsters feel pain
US research ethics agency upholds decision on informed consent
Chemistry credit disputes under the spotlight
Chemistry credit disputes under the spotlight
Contamination created controversial ‘acid-induced’ stem cells