Tag Archives: vaccine

What is Herd Immunity?

Posted on February 3, 2017 by

When you think of a herd, you probably think of cows, wildebeest or buffalo. In the animal world, there is safety in numbers – more pairs of eyes to look out for predators, for example. As humans, we don’t generally have … Continue reading →

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Microbe Talk: September 2015

Posted on September 28, 2015 by

In this month’s podcast: Ebola vaccines for chimpanzees and engineering the built environment to prevent the spread of infections. First up, Anand visited the labs of the Healthy Infrastructure Research Group at UCL. Dr Lena Ciric and her team told … Continue reading →

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Towards a universal coronavirus vaccine: science fact or science-fiction?

Posted on April 1, 2015 by

New research being presented today at the Annual Conference describes how the blood serum of people who have recovered from the SARS (serious acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus can neutralise the MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) coronavirus, which was recently discovered … Continue reading →

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Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever: A Phantom Menace

Posted on January 21, 2015 by

Viral haemorrhagic fevers are a poorly understood group of diseases, but they have entered the public consciousness in unprecedented fashion due to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The viruses that cause these diseases are transmitted by a range of vectors that … Continue reading →

Posted in Emerging Diseases, Epidemiology, Virology | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A bump in the road for a broad-spectrum flu vaccine?

Posted on March 12, 2014 by

An estimated three to five million cases of severe flu infection are reported each year. This isn’t the same as the “I can’t come to work today, I’ve got ‘flu’…” type of illness (often caused by the common cold), but … Continue reading →

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E. ictaluri vs the catfish immune system: water warfare

Posted on July 23, 2013 by

Catfish aquaculture is big business in the US. Big business. Total sales of these large, freshwater fish were worth over $340 million in 2012, with channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) accounting for more than 80% of US aquaculture business. Controlling disease-causing … Continue reading →

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