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Researchers have discovered antibodies that may make possible an influenza vaccine capable of preventing many or all strains. So far, research has only shown effectiveness against H5 and H1 strains, but the basic technique (involving an attack on the ‘neck’ of the Hemagluttin spike rather than its ‘tip’) gives it a much more generic capacity (because the ‘tip’ mutates much more rapidly than the so-called ‘neck’) than traditional vaccines. Some researchers indicated that this discovery opens up possibility for creating powerful vaccines against a range of “rapidly mutating pathogens”.  What  do the flu experts think?

From The Assembly of Things. Worth a look for VSSers.

This from Chris Kelty — a post from a blog called physics arXiv that describes an infectious disease simulator that has been loaded up with data of the entire Swedish population. In a certain way it recalls the Icelandic genome mapping project at the level of techniques, but of course the knowledge-form is, at some other level, totally different. 

From the physics arXiv text:

If you want to model how infectious diseases spread, you need a decent simulator to see how the various coping strategies pan out. Your simulation needs to take into account the population, its age and gender distribution, where people live and how far they travel from home to work and which people share homes.

But making this data realistic would be hard. After all, would anybody willingly agree to have their real data entered into such a simulation?

Actually yes. Swedes. All nine million of them.

Yep, the personal details of the entire Swedish population have been used to create what must be the world’s largest and most realistic computer simulation of the way infectious diseases spread.

Lisa Brouwers at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control and buddies have built a simulation called Microsim in which every member of the Swedish population is represented with details including their sex, age, family status, school, workplace and their geographic location at these places to within 100 metres. 

Friend of ARC Frederic Keck is organizing a conference on February 23-4, 2009 in Hong Kong on Avian Flu: Social and Anthropological Perspectives.  Among the participats is Carlo Caduff, presenting the paper “The Publics of Public Health: Pandemic Vaccine Prioritization in the United States.”