But Could He Make a Disease so Great Even He Couldn't Cure it?

Here's the abstract from a paper published in Virology Journal:

The Bible describes the case of a woman with high fever cured by our Lord Jesus Christ. Based on the information provided by the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the diagnosis and the possible etiology of the febrile illness is discussed. Infectious diseases continue to be a threat to humanity, and influenza has been with us since the dawn of human history. If the postulation is indeed correct, the woman with fever in the Bible is among one of the very early description of human influenza disease.

Infectious diseases continue to be a threat to humanity, and influenza has been with us since the dawn of human history. We analysed a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time and discussed possible etiologies.

At least they formally ruled out demon possession. The rest of the paper isn't much longer and is a pretty bizarre piece of peer-reviewed research. There's too much to write about it, I don't even know where to begin. Luckily Tara Smith at Aetiology already did most of the work.

Who says the quality of peer-reviewed publication is on the decline?

UPDATE: The paper has been retracted.

H1N1 Influenza Alert Upgraded to Level 17: "Bayman Has Concerns (But Mostly For Others)"

Why?

• The number of lab-confirmed cases is still rising, with Bayman's personal hazard ratio jumping up to 367/6,706,993,152 today, up about 6-fold or so since a couple days ago.
  
  
• This strain goes human-to human quite readily, something the wolf-crying bird flu never achieved.

• It's killed quite a few young people in Mexico. However Bayman suspects its lethality is still waaaay lower than our old friend the bird flu.

• Some flu people seem to think that making a vaccine could be difficult, as swine flu grows poorly in eggs.
  

The good news for Bayman: flu season in the northern hemisphere is almost over, so in all likelihood Bayman will get to sit this one out and see what happens in South America, before deciding whether or not to get really scared next winter.

Better information here.

Swine Flu map

We have posted about Healthmap before, however, the current swine flu outbreak is exactly the reason why this site is awesome. It's extremely cool to check out the spread of an epidemic on a map. You can also view the data on google earth. The picture here was the healthmap of the swine flu at the time of posting.
Check Healthmap out. HINT: You can deselect all infections/diseases first and then just select the swine flu to get rid of all that background.

'Coons Get the 'Fluenza...Who Knew?

The globe and mail reports on the TOTALLY GROUNDBREAKING discovery that wild raccoons get infected with influenza. Thanks guys. Now I know not to eat my garbage after the coons have been into it. As if the fear of rabies wasn't already enough.

It's always interesting to see which science stories newspapers choose to report on. There's a lots of fascinating questions in virology. This is not one of them. Is it really surprising to learn that raccoons, who will pretty much stick their noses into anything, get infected by a virus that will stick its genome into pretty much any available cell? As the author of the study says, "More diseases have been found in raccoons than pretty much any other wild animals,...You name it, raccoons get it. But they're tough as nails." Ok, this is getting a bit more interesting. Apparently infected coons can shed and transmit the flu, but they don't get sick.

Maybe someone needs to establish a coon model for immunology. What's so gosh-darn special about the raccoon immune system? That would be interesting. Warm fuzzy mammals for press releases AND some novelty...

Where do Chickens Come From?

Southeast Asia apparently. Genetically speaking? Turns out our feathered friends descend from one bad-ass mother of a bird, the jungle fowl. Head over to Greg Laden's blablablog for discussion of new genetic evidence showing that the modern day chicken is actually a hybrid of at least two different wild species of the jungle fowl, one with grey skin and one with yellow skin. Some commenter also points out on his website that these birds may have been initially domesticated for cock-fighting rather than food. Check it out if you want to read more about cock-fighting.

Continuing along with his fetish of birds/southeast Asia/hybridization, Laden also discusses a new paper on the evolution of the flu virus. The authors present evidence showing that some particularly nasty flu epidemics of the 20th century arose as a result of segmental reassortment between the genomes of different strains. This reminds me that it's been a while since we've had a good old-fashioned bird flu scare. Good to know people are still studying this.

For some reason I'm now imagining being pecked apart by a Jungle Fowl carrying a lethal strain of H1N1. Ouch. Bad way to go...