flu season – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "flu season"

DailyDirt: Yet Another Flu Season…

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The flu (aka the influenza virus) can be just annoying to some, but it’s also a deadly threat that can’t be ignored. There’s a new flu vaccine every year, but that’s a hit-or-miss game — with some years being much less effective than others. However, it’s still a good routine to get into — until someone finally develops a universal flu vaccine. If you haven’t gotten your flu shot reminder. Here it is. YMMV.

• Thousands of strains of the flu virus constantly mutate and evolve, making a universal vaccine elusive. Several groups are working on the problem, and progress against multiple strains looks encouraging. It’ll probably take a few more years of animal testing and then clinical trials, but maybe someday, we’ll be able to say goodbye to the flu. [url]
• If you’re one of the people who doesn’t think a flu shot is worth the trouble, maybe some anecdotal evidence will scare you? The common flu can trigger a series of complications such as pneumonia, a collapsed lung, a tracheotomy — and even a leg amputation. [url]
• The effectiveness of the flu shot in 2014 was less than 50%. Perhaps if a flu vaccine could be made more quickly, patients could get flu shots that were actually based on active viruses caught in the wild. It’s also possible to be infected by more than one flu virus at the same time (aka superinfection), but thankfully it doesn’t happen that frequently. [url]
• Anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen are often used to manage flu symptoms, but derivatives of these drugs could also help improve immune responses. NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) can block the production of prostaglandins and blocking specific prostaglandins could significantly improve flu survival rates. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: flu, flu season, flu shot, health, ibuprofen, influenza, medicine, nsaids, prostaglandins, universal vaccine, virus

DailyDirt: Tis The Season To Catch The Flu

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December is a time to celebrate the holidays with family and friends, but it’s also when flu season starts ramping up. Several states have already reported an increase in flu activity, and it appears that the predominant strain of flu found in patients who have been hospitalized so far is H1N1 — the “Swine Flu” that caused a global pandemic in 2009 but is now a human seasonal flu virus. Here are a few links about the flu season, pandemics, and vaccines.

• The flu pandemic of 1918 killed more than 50 million people worldwide. The virus was a bird virus that had, by chance, acquired the ability to travel via coughing and sneezing, which enabled it to infect a person who then spread it others, starting the pandemic. Could an outbreak of that scale and lethality happen again? Possibly, but there are many events that have to come together just the right way for that to occur, and there’s no way to predict it.[url]
• Flu season in the Northern Hemisphere starts in October and ends in May, typically peaking in February. In the Southern Hemisphere, flu season goes from May to October and usually peaks in August. But thanks to modern air travel, these complementary flu seasons can easily feed each other.[url]
• Scientists are working towards developing a new kind of flu vaccine — one that would provide lifetime protection against many flu strains, including ones that haven’t even evolved yet. The key to developing such a universal vaccine is to target an area of the flu virus that doesn’t change very much, such as the stems of the surface proteins. Trials in mice and other animals have shown promising results, but it could be several years or decades before an effective universal vaccine becomes available for people.[url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: flu, flu season, health, pandemic, vaccine, virus

DailyDirt: Fighting The Next Pandemic

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The last flu season was pretty rough, but there’s a new H7N9 strain that has no vaccine (yet!) and is starting to infect and kill people (instead of sticking to birds). We’re just about coming to the tenth anniversary of SARS, and we’re still creating over 100 million flu vaccines every year using egg embryos — a process that takes months, time that we might not have if a really serious flu strain spreads quickly across the globe. Here are a few projects that are making vaccines more quickly.

• Tobacco plants can be made transgenic in order to grow vaccines for us, and they’ve been shown to be able to produce over a million doses of vaccine in a few weeks. DARPA has a challenge out to anyone who can produce vaccines at a rate of 10 million doses in a month. [url]
• Genetically modified tobacco plants can be grown and harvested by robots — producing vaccine proteins very quickly and efficiently — without the need for human labor. These robots can grow tens of thousands of tobacco plants in a batch, and it’s likely only a matter of time before researchers can get these plant factories to produce other kinds of pharmaceuticals. [url]
• Flublok relies on insects to grow flu vaccines for us — a process that has been used for other kinds of vaccines, but has only started to be used for the flu. Flublok has already been FDA approved, so it will be available to patients for the 2013-2014 flu season. [url]
• Bananas could potentially be grown with edible vaccines, but the regulatory hurdles for development have caused researchers to focus on non-edible vaccines grown in other plants (like tobacco). Bananas grown for edible vaccines might still be viable for treating fish or other animals. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bananas, flu, flu season, flublok, gmo, h7n9, robots, sars, tobacco, vaccine
Companies: darpa

DailyDirt: The Flu Season Is Here…

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This year’s flu season seems to be unusually miserable and widespread. One of the flu strains getting passed around this year hasn’t been seen for a few years, so people’s immune system resistance to it may be weak. If you haven’t caught the bug yet, here are just a few links that could help you avoid it — or just tell you more about what the flu actually is.

• The Khan academy has a lesson on what the flu is, making sure everyone knows the difference between the flu and a cold. It’d be cool to see online classes for all kinds of medical information — and maybe even medical degree badges….? [url]
• The 2013 flu vaccine wards against three strains: H3N2, H1N1 and Influenza B. However, the vaccine this year has been labeled only “moderately effective” by the CDC. [url]
• Flu season comes around during the winter generally and not spring, summer or fall. But why? It could be the humidity; the flu virus survives well in warm, low-humidity air — just like the conditions in most homes in the winter. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: flu, flu season, health, humidity, khan academy, sickness, vaccine, virus
Companies: cdc

DailyDirt: Playing With Biological Fire?

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There was a time when, if something was viral, it was almost certainly a bad thing. (Now, being viral could mean you’re going to be the next Justin Bieber.) With current biotech research, the end of common diseases could be at hand or we could be launching ourselves into the next era of viciously untreatable illnesses that we’ve had a hand in creating. Hopefully, we’re not going to be living out a bad sci-fi movie plot anytime soon. Here are just a few potential precursors to the apocalypse, though.

• Oxford University researchers are testing a flu vaccine that will work on all known strains by targeting proteins in the virus that are common to all flu variants. But what happens 28 days later…? [url]
• The release of sterile transgenic mosquitoes in Malaysia was aimed at fighting dengue by reducing mosquito populations. This actually isn’t the first time these mosquitoes were tested in the field… and I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. [url]
• Synthetic biology is a growing field now that the guidelines from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCSBI) are out. “Scientists can’t be so naive to think there won’t be a possibility of bad things happening, but I think the public will grow to accept synthetic biology if we’re able to talk about all of the great things that can be done with it.” [url]
• To discover more biotech stuff, check out what’s roaming around in the StumbleUpon jungle. [url]

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: biology, flu, flu season, mosquito, vaccine, viral