Casey Finnerty's List: Contagion & Pandemic

• Yes, there probably will be a Next Big One, they say. It will most likely be caused by a virus, not by a bacterium or some other kind of bug. More specifically, we should expect an RNA virus (specifically, one that bears its genome as a single molecular strand), as distinct from a DNA virus (carrying its info on the reliable double helix, less prone to mutation, therefore less variable and adaptable). Finally, this RNA virus will almost certainly be zoonotic — a pathogen that emerges from some nonhuman animal to infect, and spread among, human beings.

  • Which of the following statements might be a reason why the next big pandemic would be caused by a virus?
    Why would it be more likely that a pandemic would be caused by a RNA virus rather than a DNA virus?
    Why would a zoonosis be more likely to cause a pandemic?
• There’s no treatment, and the fatality rate for hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, the infection in severe form, runs at about 40 percent.
• it doesn’t pass from person to person

  • Why would Sin Nombre hantavirus be unlikely to be the cause of a pandemic?

  • Not transmissible.
• Furthermore, Ebola burns so hotly in its victims, incapacitating and killing so quickly, that it is poorly adapted to achieve global dispersal.
• The broader response is more basic: learn, absorb, understand. Don’t start trying to apply your knowledge until you have some.

  • Love this!
• The influenzas are protean and explosive. Keep your eyes on that one.

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• Manufacturers for the most part still make flu vaccines the way they did in World War II: in chicken eggs.
• “The eggs should be long gone,” grumbles Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
• Fauci is more excited about something called a recombinant protein vaccine, which does not rely on growing viruses, even though it is cell-based. At Protein Sciences, a small Connecticut biotech firm, researchers isolate the gene for the flu virus’s surface proteins and insert it into an entirely different species of virus, called a baculovirus. The baculovirus infects insect cells and causes them to make huge amounts of the surface proteins, which the company uses to make Flublok, the only recombinant protein flu vaccine currently available.
• The researchers have tried various methods, including the same one used to make Flublok—insect cells churning out surface proteins.

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