The folks at 3 Quarks Daily are winnowing down the entrants for the best science blog post of the year. They want you to help select the finalists by voting for your favorite post from the 87 nominees. (The Loom makes an appearance at #76 with “The Human Lake.”) You can vote till June 8, 11:59 PM EST.
Originally published June 5, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Newsweek, June 5, 2011
When Philip Tarr heard the first reports of a massive outbreak of E. coli in Europe recently, they had a sickeningly familiar ring. Tarr, a microbiologist at Washington University, is an expert on the strains of E. coli that have periodically wreaked havoc in the United States. In 2006, for example, E. coli on contaminated spinach infected 199 people in the United States, causing kidney failure in a number of cases. The European outbreak seemed to fit the pattern: people were infected with E. coli apparently after eating contaminated vegetables.
During the whole arsenic life kerfuffle, chemist Steven Benner expressed his skepticism early and often. He wrote one of the eight critiques that Science posted last week, six months after the initial paper.
Last night Benner sent me an email:
Carl:
I have now blogged on this, since the cycle of publication at Science is rather slow.
Steve
To which I can only say: Heh. And, Read it!
Originally published June 3, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
One of the most important things that virus-hunters do is “de-discover” links between viruses and diseases. In other words, they follow up on studies that indicate a link and see if it can really hold up. Last year, a team of scientists published a paper in Science in which they reported that 67% of people they studied who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome carried a virus in their system known as XMRV. Only 3.7% of healthy people did. That association then morphed into the idea that XMRV actually causes chronic fatigue (a condition that afflicts an estimated 60 million people worldwide). Some people with chronic fatigue have sought anti-viral medicines based on the finding, declaring that they’ve felt better as a result. But when a lot of other scientists tried to find XMRV, they failed to do so.
Continue reading “The chronic fatigue virus: de-discovered?”
The New York Times, May 30, 2011
Hepatitis C is, in some ways, a high-profile disease. Worldwide, an estimated 200 million people are infected with the virus. Some of them will suffer cirrhosis, liver cancer and even death. Celebrities like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and “American Idol” have spoken publicly of their infections.
But mysteries still shroud the disease. Typically spread through drug injections, blood transfusions and sexual contact, hepatitis C can quietly cause liver damage for 20 years or more before victims become aware that they are ill. “Worldwide, it’s causing devastation,” said Brian Edlin, an epidemiologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Continue reading “Viral Outbreaks in Dogs Yield Clues on Origins of Hepatitis C”