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originally posted by: sourcecontroller
To state in NLBS that the Ebola virus has not been confirmed to be transmitted by aerosol dispersion ignores the study discussed in my thread.
On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won't undercut science's hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute.
Acknowledging the persistent threat that viruses pose to human health, geneticist and Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg once warned: “We live in evolutionary competition with microbes. There is no guarantee that we will be the survivors.” Lederberg cited the AIDS epidemic and recurrent flu epidemics as examples of the human population’s vulnerability to viral attacks.
RNA viruses tend to have unusually high rates of mutation because errors in replicating their RNA genomes are not subject to the kind of proofreading mechanisms that help reduce errors during DNA replication
In a collaborative study with the World Health Organization and seven other laboratories, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have compiled a list of 93 common mutations of the AIDS virus associated with drug resistance that will be used to track future resistance trends throughout the world.
The list is important, he said, as it helps countries gauge the effectiveness of their HIV medication programs. But assembling such a list can be a challenge, particularly with a virus that has so many resistance-related variants. On the one hand, if the list is too liberally defined, then HIV drug funders and providers may believe resistance is more widespread than is actually the case.