Lifeboat Foundation

We are being told that mistakes can not happen in labs. I for one do not believe such, so let me take you on a trip down memory lane to 2014, around the same year funding of gain of function was stopped.

Lab workers at different sites accidentally jabbed themselves with needles contaminated by anthrax or West Nile virus. An air-cleaning system meant to filter dangerous microbes out of a lab failed, but no one knew because the alarms had been turned off. A batch of West Nile virus, improperly packed in dry ice, burst open at a Federal Express shipping center. Mice infected with bubonic plague or Q fever went missing. And workers exposed to Q fever, brucellosis or tuberculosis did not realize it until they either became ill or blood tests detected the exposure.

The recent number of mistakes documented at federal laboratories involving anthrax, flu and smallpox viruses have contributed to a debate over lax government oversight at high-level containment labs.

Continue reading “Pathogen Mishaps Rise as Regulators Stay Clear” »

Murphy’s Law: Everything that can go wrong will in fact go wrong.

Here is how to set the table for Murphy’s Law and become the epic center in the world for the COVID-19:

A. Eliminate the entire global health security team at the White House. Their job? Managing pandemics like COVID-19.

Continue reading “France’s first Covid-19 case ‘dates back to December’, flu retest shows” »

The ESA’s fifth call for medium-class missions (M5) is in its full study phase. Three finalists, EnVision, SPICA, and THESEUS, remain from more than two dozen proposals. A selection will be made in the summer of 2021, with a launch date tentatively set for 2032. In February, the author attended the EnVision conference in Paris, and reported on the progress of that consortium. The THESEUS meeting is meant to be in Malaga, Spain, in May, and the SPICA collaboration was scheduled for March 9–11 in Leiden, The Netherlands. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened and the physical meeting was cancelled. Instead, the group met via Zoom teleconference.

Cosmic Vision is the moniker for the ESA’s current space science campaign. Formulated in 2005, it succeeded the Horizon 2000 Plus campaign and described a number of different mission classes in the fields of astronomy, solar system exploration, and fundamental physics beyond 2015. Early on, it was decided that their overall scientific goals would center around four fundamental questions:

The last time NASA launched astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch the final flight of the space shuttle in July 2011. The expectation, by NASA and others, was that similar crowds would show up when commercial crew flights finally began. The large crowds that showed up for launches like the first Falcon Heavy mission in 2018 or even relatively routine cargo launches appeared to confirm that belief, and NASA was planning for big crowds, not just of the public outside the gates of KSC but also official guests and working media inside, for a historic mission.

Then came the pandemic, and all those plans went out the window.

Now NASA is in the unusual, but understandable, position of telling people not to witness in person one of the agency’s biggest missions in the last decade. “We are asking people to watch from home,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday in a media teleconference about the upcoming SpaceX Demo-2 commercial crew mission.

To trace the trail of the virus worldwide, Lim’s team is using a new technology called next-generation sequencing at ASU’s Genomics Facility, to rapidly read through all 30,000 chemical letters of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic code, called a genome.

Each sequence is deposited into a worldwide gene bank, run by a nonprofit scientific organization called GISAID. To date, over 16,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences have been deposited GISAID’s EpiCoVTM Database. The sequence data shows that SARS-CoV-2 originated a single source from Wuhan, China, while many of the first Arizona cases analyzed showed travel from Europe as the most likely source.

Now, using a pool of 382 nasal swab samples obtained from possible COVID-19 cases in Arizona, Lim’s team has identified a SARS-CoV-2 mutation that had never been found before—where 81 of the letters have vanished, permanently deleted from the genome.

While COVID-19 has infected millions of people worldwide and killed hundreds of thousands, there is currently no vaccine. In response, researchers have been evaluating the effectiveness of various antiviral drugs as possible COVID-19 treatments.

A new set of recommendations for health care workers on the front lines, to help them make decisions on how to treat the most critical COVID-19 patients, those with severe lung or heart failure, has been published.

Most newly discharged patients who recently recovered from COVID-19 produce virus-specific antibodies and T cells, suggests a study published on May 3rd in the journal Immunity, but the responses of different patients are not all the same. While the 14 patients examined in the study showed wide-ranging immune responses, results from the 6 of them that were assessed at two weeks after discharge suggest that antibodies were maintained for at least that long. Additional results from the study indicate which parts of the virus are most effective at triggering these immune responses and should therefore be targeted by potential vaccines.

It is not clear why immune responses varied widely across the patients. The authors say this variability may be related to the initial quantities of virus that the patients encountered, their physical states, or their microbiota. Other open questions include whether these immune responses protect against COVID-19 upon re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2, as well as which types of T cells are activated by infection with the virus. It is also important to note that the laboratory tests that are used to detect antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in humans still need further validation to determine their accuracy and reliability.

“These findings suggest both B and T cells participate in immune-mediated protection against the viral infection,” says co-senior study author Chen Dong of Tsinghua University. “Our work has provided a basis for further analysis of protective immunity and for understanding the mechanism underlying the development of COVID-19, especially in severe cases. It also has implications for designing an effective vaccine to protect against infection.”

The breakthrough, which identified the location and function of every human gene, offered the promise of medical care tailored specifically to individual patients, based on their personal genetic makeup.

When researchers identified a gene associated with a 44 per cent risk of breast cancer in women, for example, it seemed that protecting them might be as simple as deactivating that gene.

But the promise of such personalized medicine has not fully materialized, say two McMaster researchers, because the full sophistication of the genetic blueprint has a more complex and far-reaching influence on human health than scientists had first realized.