On the Italian coastline, overlooking the shimmering calm of the Adriatic Sea, I’ve been catching up with an old friend whilst finally having chance to immerse into Garcia’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Her heart for Brazil and love for all health issues regarding Mother and Child, combined with my own intrigue for emerging viruses, has led us to discuss the inevitable. The Zika Virus.
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Since it was first picked up 3 years ago, MERS-Coronavirus has gone global. During my short trip to the Philippines, I don full protective gear as I’m given the chance to see suspected cases up close and personal. We still don’t know where it came from, nor do we have any medicines to treat it.
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I have flown straight into back-to-back Philippine Typhoons, hearing frequent reports of floods and landslides. Looking forward to 2016, there is cautious optimism amongst scientists and clinicians for combating an altogether different geographical hazard across this region of tropics, with the potential rollout of a vaccine for Dengue Virus!
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During a whirlwind final week to the first term of Graduate Medical School, I find myself presenting amongst passionate early career researchers at a Royal Society conference, and reminded of the challenges we face in the complex field of Tropical Medicine.
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Here’s a great episode from Earth’s Professor of Virology – Vincent Racaniello – on his weekly Podcast about viruses. The kind….that make you sick! In this episode we get a fantastic insight into the challenges the Ebola outbreak in west Africa has had (and continues to…) on the likes of infectious disease Physicians, field volunteer scientists and epi-nerds. You can watch the
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Hand, Food and Mouth Disease cases have boomed in SE Asia to phenomenally high levels. It’s a growing and emerging threat to the health of infants.
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The cockerels were exuberantly sounding the alarm, proclaiming the ascent of the Far Eastern sun as though the new day offered potential to every desire in these spiritual lands. Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!! Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!! The other vacationers, which included my English father and Filipino mother with a collage of cousins, uncles and aunties, had voyaged from the polluted megalopolis of Manila to this
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What a difference a day makes? Try two hundred and forty-five. Exactly that many days lay between the attitudes observed to the Ebola virus research updates from the annual Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Scientific Day held in May of 2014, to the ‘Topics in Infection’ conference held by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene at the end of
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International borders are meaningless to infectious diseases such as Yellow Fever Date of Event: July 19th 2014 The tatty card with its leaden yellow shade lay submerged under various other travel documents at the bottom of my rugged rucksack, falling within eyeshot as the Impala brought us closer to the border of Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania. Through
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The family, filoviridae, of which the virus in question belongs, allows us to conjure up an image of the perpetrator; after all, the Latin filum alludes to its’ filamentous structure. A hidden threadlike set of molecules indeed. All filoviruses that have caused disease in humans have been endemic to sub-Saharan Africa only and it is here, in West Africa to be more
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