The reason the Delta variant developed is that the US (at least, I don’t know the state of other first-world countries and their vaccine supplies) hoarded the vaccine unnecessarily, creating a fucking petri dish of the global south that literally anyone familiar with virology could tell you was a breeding ground for mutations. This was inevitable because of the way the countries that developed the vaccine went about distribution of the vaccine, not because of the vaccine itself.
Would also like to add that not releasing the patent of the vaccine was also a contributing factor. With countires unable to produce the vaccine for themselves and being completely at the mercy of pharma companies looking to make bank off the vaccine, it allowed Delta to reach the level it is at.
The other thing about measles is that it resets your body’s memory of other diseases. So all those times you’ve gotten sick? Your body’s memory cells no longer remember those illnesses, so even if you get the same type of illness again your body will react like it’s the first time you’ve been sick.
It’s so much worse than “just a disease”.
Measles does WHAT
Holy fuck
What the fuck what the fuck what the fUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK
antivaxxers also, in part, helped sabotaged the human lyme disease vaccine for lyme disease caused by borrelia burgdorferi infection (until 2016 the only known species of lyme disease causing bacteria in the USA). In 1998, the first lyme disease vaccine for the strain of the bacteria prevalent in the USA licensed. It passed clinical trials and was shown to be safe and effective; it was between 76 and 92% effective at preventing lyme disease with 3 injections. Antivaxxers proceeded to abuse the adverse affect reporting system, often complaining of arthritis, and this caused media and general hysteria about the vaccine. if you remember the flu vaccine hysteria around the swine flu epidemic, it was kind of like that. despite double-blind trials conducted both before and after licensing, that was unable to support their claims and instead displaying that the vaccine was safe and effective, the damage was done, and the vaccine was shelved in the USA. you can get a lyme disease vaccine in Europe, but Europe has a different strain of the bacteria that causes lyme disease.
Lyme disease can become very serious, it can infect the nervous system and cause neurological problems especially in young children who are often bitten on the head or the neck, undiagnosed it can cause chronic health issues that mimic other diseases. Without safe prophylactic measures beyond trying to minimize contact w ticks, this has driven people who have had lyme disease, have chronic effects from mass-disseminated lyme disease infection, or people who believe they have chronic lyme disease to go to quack doctors and undergo unsafe, unapproved medical treatment in an attempt to stop suffering.
This would not be happening on the scale that it is if antivaxxers didn’t straight up execute a supervillain plot to sabotage the lyme disease vaccine. the vaccine was licensed in december 1998, which was the year andrew wakefield published his fraudulent research on the MMR vaccine
antivaxer are terrorists and should be dealt like one
H.Bomberguy’s video on the anti-vaccine movement is absolutely worth watching in its entirety. Because it lays out just how fucking twisted and wrong the entire thing is, and how this entire movement that is KILLING CHILDREN is based on a lie for money.
wait wait wait wait WAIT!
YOU GUYS HAD A VACCINE AGAINST FUCKING LYME????
AND THOSE ASSHATS HELPED TO SHELF THAT STUFF?????????
Do you people even KNOW just how much trouble lyme disease makes every fucking year? Holy shit think of the possibilities!!!
So when I say I hate anti-vaxxers, yeah. This is why.
Yeah its not a viable belief system, it doesn’t have any nugget of truth or good intentions in it, the lie and the packaged alternatives that come with it are quicker easier money than you could ever make climbing the ranks of “big pharma,” these lies kill people, they become politicized and contaminate government legislation, and believers are not just quaint fringe eccentrics who only harm themselves. They’re abusing their kids, hampering medical progress, robbing other people of medical choice in situations like the Lyme vaccine, and actively making the world around them worse and deadlier. No mercy or tolerance for anti vaccine propaganda. Make it legally terrorism.
Gonna say it on every reblog of this post I see - This began because of ableism against autistic people. Jenny McCarthy insisted that her child’s autism was caused by vaccines, and enough people hated the thought of ever having an autistic child that they wouldn’t use vaccines. They did not care that their child would die of the illnesses prevented by vaccines, they would rather have a dead child than an autistic one.
Measles is also THE most communicable disease. It has an R value of 16-18 which means that every person with measles will infect 16-18 people.
As a comparison, the most communicable Covid variant, omicron has an R value of about 3-4. And yet colonized the entire world in a few months.
Just think what a measles outbreak in an unvaccinated community could do. A measles infection in a child does to their immune system what 7 years of HIV does.
African Civet, Long-Eared Owl, Heliobacter Pylori, Japanese Rhinoceros Beetle, Bacteriophage, Manta Ray, Shaggy Mane Mushroom, Echeveria Succulent, Parson’s Chameleon, and a Dilophosaurus Skull.
It was really cool to see how @acornpress took my drawings and turned them into fun little charms. I wanted to come up with a set of pins that sort of coincided with my biological patches set, so I chose favorites from the ten disciplines and voila- cute, bright, little pins!
I’ve finally finished my biological patches set! After many months of designing, editing, and trial and error, I’m proud to post up photos of the final products!
They are woven with bright, beautiful colors that will endure many washes and adventures to come. They’re only $8 in my store:
Here are the first five patches in my biological patch set. Once all ten are made, the rainbow of studies will be complete! Each one is illustrated, digitized, and embroidered by me. Stay tuned for more! Next up is herpetology ;)
Things you must know about Hantavirus [USMLE Quick Review] Orthohantavirus is a genus of single-stranded, enveloped, negative-sense RNA viruses in the family Hantaviridae within the order Bunyavirales. Members of this genus may be called orthohantaviruses or simply hantaviruses. Orthohantaviruses typically cause chronic asymptomatic infection in rodents.
What does Ebola actually do? By Kelly Servick, 13 August 2014 || Science/AAAS | News
Behind the unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa lies a species with an incredible power to overtake its host.
Zaire ebolavirus and the family of filoviruses to which it belongs owe their virulence to mechanisms that first disarm the immune response and then dismantle the vascular system.
The virus progresses so quickly that researchers have struggled to tease out the precise sequence of events, particularly in the midst of an outbreak. Much is still unknown, including the role of some of the seven proteins that the virus’s RNA makes by hijacking the machinery of host cells and the type of immune response necessary to defeat the virus before it spreads throughout the body. But researchers can test how the live virus attacks different cells in culture and can observe the disease’s progression in nonhuman primates—a nearly identical model to humans.
Continue reading to find out some of the basic things we understand about how Ebola and humans interact …
FromScience Magazine SPECIAL COLLECTION of ARTICLES: the Ebola Virus
Given the current outbreak, unprecedented in terms of number of people killed and rapid geographic spread, ScienceandScience Translational Medicine have made this collection of research and news articles on the viral disease freely available to researchers and the general public.
“More and more colleges are testing wastewater from dorms to monitor the spread of the coronavirus. It’s often cheaper — and can detect an infection days before respiratory symptoms show up, or even if they never do.”
Interesting work being done by colleges to prevent/control the spread of COVID-19!
I have discovered there is a small subset of people who do not believe the virus has ever been isolated, therefore it does not exist. They will link you to random sites that claim no one has ever isolated purified COVID-19. They will also discredit electron microscope experiments that showed the COVID-19 virus in infected tissue, because to them that is not proof, because they did not isolate the virus from the infected tissue.
Figure from Liu et al., 2020. Cryo-electron microscope images of a purified clinical isolate of the COVID-19 virus.
So how do you change their mind? Honestly, I don’t think they will change their mind. They will not trust any of the science you would use to justify electron microscope photos of COVID-19. They do not trust PCR, genome sequencing, or any genetic assay. So why bother responding to them? For me, it’s to prevent others from falling for their misinformation. This virus has done so much damage, denying its existence is plain ignorance at this point.
What does Ebola actually do? By Kelly Servick, 13 August 2014 || Science/AAAS | News
Behind the unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa lies a species with an incredible power to overtake its host.
Zaire ebolavirus and the family of filoviruses to which it belongs owe their virulence to mechanisms that first disarm the immune response and then dismantle the vascular system.
The virus progresses so quickly that researchers have struggled to tease out the precise sequence of events, particularly in the midst of an outbreak. Much is still unknown, including the role of some of the seven proteins that the virus’s RNA makes by hijacking the machinery of host cells and the type of immune response necessary to defeat the virus before it spreads throughout the body. But researchers can test how the live virus attacks different cells in culture and can observe the disease’s progression in nonhuman primates—a nearly identical model to humans.
Continue reading to find out some of the basic things we understand about how Ebola and humans interact …
STRUCTURE OF CHIKUNGUNYA VIRUS-LIKE PARTICLES Modeled Using X-ray Crystallography and Electron Cryo-microscopy
Chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus discovered in 1955 by two scientists in Tanzania, has been a health problem in Africa and southern Asia for decades. It made its way to the Caribbean in late 2013.
Research article: Siyang Sun et al: “Structural analyses at pseudo atomic resolution of Chikungunya virus and antibodies show mechanisms of neutralization” || April 2, 2013 || eLife 2013;2:e00435 [an open access peer reviewed journal]
The Chikungunya virus is carried by mosquitos and can cause a number of diseases in humans including encephalitis, which can be fatal in some cases, and severe arthritis.
Chikungunya virus has a single-stranded RNA genome that codes for four non-structural proteins and five structural proteins. …
A recent mutation in the E1 protein of the virus has allowed it to efficiently reproduce in a different species of mosquitos, leading to a Chikungunya epidemic in Réunion Island in 2005 and the subsequent infection of millions of individuals in Africa and Asia. The virus [has already spread to] the Americas.
[Recently, researchers from Purdue University and several other US institutions, led by Siyang Sun] used two techniques – X-ray crystallography and electron cryo-microscopy – to determine the structure of Chikungunya virus-like particles, and to obtain new insights into the interactions of these particles with four related antibodies.
Electron cryo-microscopy was used to figure out the structure of the particles at near atomic resolution, and X-ray crystallography was used to determine the atomic resolution structures of two of the four Fab [fragment antigen-binding] antibodies that neutralize the Chikungunya virus.
Electron cryo-microscopy was also used to probe the complex formed by the interactions between the virus-like particles and the antibodies. eLife
Mycobacterium tuberculosis utilizes macrophages for its replication! (It uses the usual killer to expand it’s army :O ) How does tuberculosis bacilli survive in macrophages? M. tuberculosis has evolved a number of very effective survival strategies - It inhibits phagosome-lysosome fusion and inhibits phagosome acidification ensuring it’s survival inside the macrophage.
2. Brucella - Has chains, like Bruce Lee.
Brucellahas a LPS O-chain. It ensures the Brucella containing vacuole (BCV) avoids fusion with lysosomes, prevents the deposition of complement at the bacterial surface and forms stable large clusters with MHC-II named macrodomians in the cell surface, interfering with MHC-II presentation of peptides to specific CD4+ T cells. Woah.
3. Listeria - It gets internalized in a vacuole and then runs away.
The pore-forming protein listeriolysin O mediates escape from host vacuoles. Once in the cytosol, the L. monocytogenes mediates efficient actin-based motility, thereby propelling the bacteria into neighboring cells. The cytosol is a favorable environment for listeria’s growth.
4. Mycobacterium leprae - Cholesterol and TACO!
Mycobacterium leprae is able to induce lipid droplet formation in infected macrophages. Cholesterol mediates the recruitment of TACO from the plasma membrane to the phagosome. TACO, also termed as coronin-1A (CORO1A), is a coat protein that prevents phagosome-lysosome fusion and thus degradation of mycobacteria in lysosomes. The entering of mycobacteria at cholesterol-rich domains of the plasma membrane and their subsequent uptake in TACO-coated phagosomes promotes intracellular survival.
5. Coxiella brunetti - The indestrucible
This hardy, obligate intracellular pathogen has evolved to not only survive, but to thrive, in the harshest of intracellular compartments: the phagolysosome. Following internalization, the nascent Coxiella phagosome ultimately develops into a large and spacious parasitophorous vacuole (PV) that acquires lysosomal characteristics such as acidic pH, acid hydrolases and cationic peptides, defences designed to rid the host of intruders.
6. Salmonella - TTSS
Salmonella have a specialized secretion system, termed the type III secretion system (TTSS), as well as proteins secreted by this system, are encoded in Salmonella pathogenicity island 1 (SPI1). TTSS are used by bacterial pathogens to inhibit their phagocytosis, induce eukaryotic cell death, and alter the host cell cytoskeleton. Salmonella species have at least one other TTSS encoded on SPI2 that appears to be involved in intracellular survival.
7. Human Immunodeficiency Virus - Tries to not attract attention
After infecting cells, HIV survives. Ever wondered why? It’s because the HIV protein, Nef plays a role in downregulating the expression of various proteins needed for recognition by potentially dangerous CD8 T cells. Nef lowers the surface expression of CD4, and several haplotypes of MHC-I by redirecting their transport from the trans-Golgi network. Another gene, Tat, appears to upregulate the expression of Bcl-2 during the early phase of cellular infection, increasing the likelihood that it will receive survival signals.
Many viruses can survive intracellularly, but I’ve included specifically HIV in this list because it survives in immune cells and it is an important virus to know.
I’m pretty sure that everyone knows about COVID-19 (CoronavirusDisease 2019) by now - it has just been declared a pandemicby the World Health Organisation (WHO). But how does it infect our cells, and how can we protect ourselves against it?
Pathology
As with many other viruses, COVID-19 works by docking itself onto cellular receptors - in this case, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). A spike protein on the virus binds to ACE2, allowing it to enter the cell - this pathway bears some similarities to the related virus which resulted in the 2003 SARS outbreak. As ACE2 is most commonly found in the respiratory system, the most serious symptoms are often respiratory in nature.
Symptoms include fever, dry cough, fatigue, phlegm production, and shortness of breath amongst others.
When the virus releases its genetic material into the cell, its genetic material directs our cellular machinery to synthesise viral proteins and replicate its RNA, which assemble in the cell and are released into the extracellular environment when formed, allowing the virus to be spread to other cells. The host cell may also eventually burst and die.
Preventive measures
As COVID-19 is a virus, antibiotics do not work against it; antibiotics work by targeting bacterial structures or processes, which are are not present in viruses.
Alcohol, on the other hand, works against bothbacteria and COVID-19. This is because they have phospholipid bilayers surrounding them, which are dissolved by alcohol. This mechanical disruption of the viral envelope results in the virus being unable to merge with our cellular membrane and release its genetic material into our cells. Soap also acts as a disruptor of phospholipid membranes - which is why even non-antibacterial soaps are effective at slowing the spread of COVID-19. It is advised to wash your hands with soap regularly (for at least 20 seconds) and to use hand sanitiser if hand washing is not possible.
As COVID-19 is spread by respiratory droplets which can be produced by breathing, speaking, sneezing, and coughing amongst other ways, it is advised to avoid unnecessary human contact and to wear face masks if sick.Sneezes and coughs should be covered with tissue paper, which should be disposed of immediately. While there have been reports that COVID-19 can be spread by asymptomatic carriers, it is believed that it is most likely to be spread by symptomatic patients.
What do I do if I’m sick?
If you’re in the US or UK, visit the links below and follow the instructions/guidance if you are sick; for other countries, please visit your country’s health ministry’s website for further guidance.
Extras: Check out Wash Your Lyrics to create your own customised hand-washing poster from any song of your choice! I used this website to generate the poster above.
