Is The Flu A Virus
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January 06, 2012
Health
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Tags: is the flu a virus, is the flu a virus 1918, is the flu a virus of bacteria, is the flu a virus or bacteria, is the flu a virus or bacterial infection
Is Swine Flu A Race-Specific Virus?
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Animal Vaccines: West Nile Virus $9.11 Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher’s book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: West Nile virus (WNV) is a virus of the family Flaviviridae. Part of the Japanese encephalitis (JE) antigenic complex of viruses, it is found in both tropical and temperate regions. It mainly infects birds, but is known to infect humans, horses, dogs, cats, bats, chipmunks, skunks, squirrels, and domestic rabbits. The main route of human infection is through the bite of an infected mosquito. Image reconstructions and cryoelectron microscopy reveal a 4550 nm virion covered with a relatively smooth protein surface. This structure is similar to the dengue fever virus; both belong to the genus Flavivirus within the family Flaviviridae. The genetic material of WNV is a positive-sense, single strand of RNA, which is between 11,000 and 12,000 nucleotides long; these genes encode seven non-structural proteins and three structural proteins. The RNA strand is held within a nucleocapsid formed from 12 kDa protein blocks; the capsid is contained within a host-derived membrane altered by two viral glycoproteins. WNV has three different effects on humans. The first is an asymptomatic infection; the second is a mild febrile syndrome termed West Nile Fever; the third is a neuroinvasive disease termed West Nile meningitis or encephalitis. The population proportion of these three states is roughly 110:30:1. The second, febrile stage has an incubation period of 2 to 8 days followed by fever, headache, chills, diaphoresis (excessive sweating), weakness, lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes), drowsiness, pain in the joints and symptoms like those of influenza or the flu. Occasionally there is a short-lived truncal rash and some patients experience gastrointestinal symptoms including nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, or diarrhea. All symptoms are resolved within … More: |
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Another Place to Die $21.54 Another Place to Die is a vivid account of individuals caught up in a worldwide flu pandemic. Set in Vancouver, Canada, this is a terrifying and realistic scenario of people facing the horror of a killer virus that will kill millions. Everything your Government said would protect you is a lie. Make a choice. Escape to a safe place or tough it out. As martial law is declared and soldiers have orders to shoot anyone breaking curfew, normal life begins to break down. Mass burial pits are being dug. Everyone is afraid of each other. The Pandemic is coming. Where will you go? Where exactly is safe? Another Place To Die is an essential survival manual everyone should read. |
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Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology $21 This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS. What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God’s agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico. But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject’s dizzying philosophical implications: Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day a-life will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station — or, worse still, a dead end? |
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Avian Influenza: Science, Policy and Politics $125 Over the past decade, substantial resources have been spent on tackling avian influenza and building a global capacity for a pandemic response. The catastrophic costs of the 1918 influenza pandemic are well documented, and the swine flu pandemic of 2009-10 has raised the alarm yet again. Across the world, surveillance systems have been upgraded, stockpiles of antiviral drugs and influenza vaccines have been created, veterinary and public health systems have been improved and poultry production and marketing has been dramatically restructured. What are the lessons from this experience? And what does this suggest for the future? This book explores how virus genetics, ecology and epidemiology intersect with economic, political and policy processes in a variety of places—from Bangkok to Washington, to Jakarta, Cairo, Rome and London. It focuses on the interaction of international and national responses—and in particular the experiences of Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. It asks how effective the disease surveillance and response system is — and whether it can respond to a new pandemic threat. The comparative analysis reveals the challenges and limitations of a technocratic, centralized response, and the need to take local contexts seriously. Drawing from these experiences, the book concludes with a discussion of future prospects and challenges, examining in particular what a “One World, One Health” approach—where approaches to animal, human and ecosystem health are integrated—would look like in practice. |
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Back-contamination $78.99 Back-contamination is the informal but widely employed name for the introduction of microbial extraterrestrial organisms into Earth’s biosphere. It is assumed that any such contact will be disruptive or at least have consequences over which human beings will have little control. The threat of back-contamination from the Moon was the main reason for quarantine procedures adopted for the Apollo program, up until the completion of Apollo 14. Astronauts and lunar samples were quarantined in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Back-contamination is easily misunderstood. The likelihood that a human being or any other animal could literally acquire an alien virus is effectively nil, as viruses are host specific. This does not mean that extraterrestrial microbes cannot act upon one pathogenically: spores might use an organism’s body as hosts, while the ingestion of bacteria in any form could produce toxic chemicals. When human beings ingest contaminated food, for example, they are not acquiring a virus in the manner of the flu but the experience may still be lethal because of toxic compounds. |
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Beating the Flu $10.57 Experts agree that the world is due for a flu pandemic, and the Bird Flu virus?with a 70% kill rate?may cause just such a catastrophe. Even conservative estimates say such a scenario could kill 2 million Americans and shut down economic services as the virus rages across the globe. As the world community busily prepares for the potential nightmare, it’s essential that individuals arm themselves with up-to-date information. In Beating the Flu, Dr. J. E. Williams apprises the situation honestly and offers vital advice for avoiding Bird Flu as well as steps for safely overcoming the virus should you contract it. Dr. Williams argues that due to a severe shortage in antiviral pharmaceutical drugs, natural medicines will play a crucial role in minimizing the outbreak and ensuring good health for you and your family. |