https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/health/coronavirus-immunity-future.html
Posts Tagged ‘x57s’
When a Virus Is the Cure | The New Yorker
January 26, 2021https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/when-a-virus-is-the-cure
QT:{{”
To make matters worse, fears of antibiotic resistance have, in recent decades, created a perverse incentive in medical research: new antibiotics, to remain effective, must be used sparingly, as so-called antibiotics of last resort. As a result, it is almost impossible to recoup the cost of developing them.
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Great article!… But I don’t see how phages will solve the economic conundrum: the “perverse incentive [that]…new antibiotics, to remain effective, must be used sparingly…As a result, it is almost impossible to recoup the cost of developing them.”
How COVID unlocked the power of RNA vaccines
January 21, 2021.@ElieDolgin’s great feature on the development of new mRNA vaccines highlights how important breakthroughs in lipid nanoparticles were. Interesting that a lot of the key research appears to be funded by @Darpa.
Opinion | The Pandemic, from the Coronavirus’s Perspective – The New York Times
November 21, 2020Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize laureate in 1958, at age 33, wrote: “The future of humanity and microbes likely will unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be titled ‘Our Wits Versus Their Genes.’ ”
Wits are fundamentally a product of genes, and in the end, genes beat wits. QT:{{”
Chimpanzees were a species in decline, alas, because of habitat loss and killing by humans; humans were a species in ascendance. The SIVcpz virus reversed its own evolutionary prospects by getting into us and adapting well to the new host. It jumped from a sinking lifeboat onto a luxury cruise ship.
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SARS-CoV-2 has done likewise, though its success has occurred much more quickly. It has now infected more than 30 million people, just under half as many as the number of people infected by H.I.V., and in 10 months rather than 10 decades. It’s not the most successful human-infecting virus on the planet — that distinction lies elsewhere, possibly with the Epstein-Barr virus, a very transmissible species of herpesvirus, which may reside within at least 90 percent of all humans, causing syndromes in some and lying latent in most. But SARS-CoV-2 is off to a roaring start.
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Now, for purposes of illustration, imagine a different scenario, involving a different virus. In the mountain forests of Rwanda lives a small, insectivorous bat known as Hill’s horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus hilli). This bat is real, but it has been glimpsed only rarely and is classified as critically endangered. Posit a coronavirus, for which this bat serves as reservoir host. Call the virus RhRW19 (a coded abbreviation of the sort biologists use), because it was detected within the species Rhinolophus hilli (Rh), in Rwanda (RW), in 2019 (19).
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-covid-evolution.html
The Children Never Had Covid. So Why Did They Have Coronavirus Antibodies? – The New York Times
November 19, 2020Wonder whether the chronic inflammation in asthmatic patients also has similar effects & if this explains why #COVID19 didn’t hit asthmatics quite as hard as was expected.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/health/coronavirus-children.html
QT:{{”
After examining blood taken from 190 people before the pandemic emerged, Dr. Elledge and his colleagues concluded that many already had antibodies, including the one targeting the base of the spike — presumably from infections with related coronaviruses that cause colds.
But while adults might get one or two colds a year, Dr. Elledge said, children may get up to a dozen. As a result, many develop floods of coronavirus antibodies that are present almost continuously; they may lessen cold symptoms, or even leave children with colds that are symptomless but still infectious.
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What’s the worst that could happen? – The world should think better about catastrophic and existential ri sks | Briefing | The Economist
November 19, 2020When Pigs Fly, They Want Drinks, Leg Room – WSJ
November 17, 2020https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-pigs-fly-they-want-drinks-leg-room-11605022688
Amazing an elephant could be transported as well, with continuous food service during the trip….
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