Researchers at the Jean Mérieux/INSERM facility in Lyon, France, are working with the highly contagious H1N1 virus and its more lethal relation H5N1, better known as the avian flu. The scientists are attempting to determine if H1N1 could reassort with H5N1, blending their genetic material, and whether a resulting virus could have the worst traits of the original viruses.

There's a method behind creating this superflu. The facility has been working to anticipate the path current and future pandemics might take so that precautions and treatments can be developed. The team is attempting to determine when reassortment between the two viruses would produce a viable product, and which reassortments — if any — are likely to occur.

Jean Mérieux/INSERM is a biosecurity level four facility, and the researchers must wear spacesuit-like hazmat attire when in the lab, but the researchers must watch out for scratches and bites from the mice and ferrets used to test the virulence and transmissibility of the viruses.

Swine flu: One killer virus, three key questions [Nature via Metafilter]

Announcing the change in pandemic status level, the World Health Organization made clear that this did not mean that the virus was any more dangerous than previously thought, but simply that it was more widespread; the decision to upgrade the status came after it emerged that the virus was spreading freely not only in Mexico and North America, but also Australia, Britain, Chile and Spain. In addition, WHO director general Margaret Chan said, further spread of the virus was inevitable at this point, adding that "we have to brace ourselves for more deaths."

Currently, the virus has officially spread to 74 countries, with over 27,000 cases identified, and 141 deaths.

With 27,000 cases, swine flu is officially a pandemic [The Independent]

Avian influenza viruses do not spread extensively in cells at 32 degrees Celsius, the temperature inside the human nose. The researchers say this is probably because the viruses usually infect the guts of birds, which are warmer, at 40 degrees Celsius.

Professor Wendy Barclay, one of the authors of the study, added:

Bird viruses are out there all the time but they can only cause pandemics when they undergo certain changes. Our study gives vital clues about what kinds of changes would be needed in order for them to mutate and infect humans, potentially helping us to identify which viruses could lead to a pandemic.

So we're not exactly off the hook, given the rate at which viruses are known to mutate. But we also know exactly what kind of mutation they'd need: Something that would allow them to feel comfy in our noses.

via Eurekalert

28 Days Later
Disease: Rage virus
Released by: Animal rights activists
Symptoms: Zombification, flesh-eating
Any humanity left? UK is quarantined and left for dead. Rest of the world survives.



Invasion
Disease: Space fungus
Released by: It clings to the outside of the space shuttle, and when the shuttle crashes people pick up pieces of it and bring the disease into towns, where it spreads.
Symptoms: Lack of emotion, desire for world peace.
Any humanity left? Many people are infected but we're saved by an airborne antidote. We know the world has returned to normal when everybody starts going back to war again.



I Am Legend
Disease: Gene therapy delivered via virus gone wrong
Released by: Well-meaning liberal doctor trying to do good
Symptoms: Zombification, flesh-eating, fear of light.
Any humanity left? Just Will Smith, and (spoilers!) a tiny walled town in New England



Outbreak
Disease: Motaba virus (a fictional version of Ebola)
Released by: Bad guys selling illegal African monkeys to Americans
Symptoms: Barfy bloody death
Any humanity left? Sadly, almost all of humanity survives.



Rabid
Disease: Plastic surgery-induced armpit penis that drinks blood (did we mention this was directed by David Cronenberg in the 70s?)
Released by: Mad surgeon Dr. Keloid, operating on the main character (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers)
Symptoms: Growing a penis-shaped thing under your arm that drinks other people's blood, erases their memories, and turns them into zombies
Any humanity left? Disease is contained within the city.



Andromeda Strain (the miniseries)
Disease: Nano space virus thing
Released by: Fallen satellite
Symptoms: Totally disgusting bloody barfy skin covered in insta-bumps
Any humanity left? Saved by the CDC, but just barely



Doomsday
Disease: Reaper virus
Released by: Unknown, but centered in Scotland, which the UK walls off in a nation-wide quarantine
Symptoms: Death
Any humanity left? Yes, the immune. They have turned into cannibalistic punk rockers, medieval knights, and racecar drivers. Which makes the Reaper virus basically the most awesome thing to ever happen in the UK.



Doom
Disease: A 24th chromosome from Mars
Released by: Union Aerospace Corporation
Symptoms: If you are "good," you are made superhuman with mega-healing, and if you are "bad" you become a flesh-eating toothface with the ability to shoot your tongue at victims to infect them.
Any humanity left? Not on Mars.



World War Z
Disease: African rabies
Released by: Unknown - but thought to have begun in China
Symptoms: Undeath
Any humanity left? Yes, and the shattered survivors of the zombie wars are the subject of the novel, which is being made into a much-anticipated movie right now.



The Signal
Disease: Mind-altering signal sent via television and telephone in an Atlanta-like unnamed city
Released by: Unknown evil media conglomerate
Symptoms: Psychotic, murderous rage; hallucinations
Any humanity left? A few survive in the city; unknown how many more were affected in the world



Quarantine
Disease: Bioweapon
Released by: Doomsday cult
Symptoms: Foaming at the mouth, vampiric quest to bite people
Any humanity left: We see the disease spread rapidly through an apartment building, which is quarantined. There is a hint that the disease has already gotten out and cannot be stopped.

Researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at the Ondokuz Mayis University, Turkey, tested the phones of doctors and nurses in hospital operating rooms and intensive care units. They found that almost 95% were contaminated with bacteria of different types, potentially causing infections ranging from relatively minor skin complaints to life-threatening illness. Only 10% of staff regularly cleaned their phone. According to the authors, "Our results suggest cross-contamination of bacteria between the hands of healthcare workers and their mobile phones. These mobile phones could act as a reservoir of infection which may facilitate patient-to-patient transmission of bacteria in a hospital setting".

via Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials

To make its predictions accurate, researchers first looked over the data on where influenza-like illness (ILI) outbreaks took place in the U.S. over the past five years. Then they pored over search data, looking for key phrases that popped up again and again when the outbreaks occurred. You can see to the left a chart of some of the searches that correlated most strongly to a spike in ILI cases. Note that the terms listed in the chart are not exact search terms (nobody actually searches on the phrase "influenza complication"), but instead capture the idea of what people searched on. So "influenza complication" would mean people searched on things like "runny nose" or "aches and chills."

After analyzing the data, researchers came up with a system where they weighted certain search topics for how much they seemed connected to ILI outbreaks. In the chart, you can see searches on flu symptoms rank high for a correlation with hospital data on lots of flu patients. Searches on specific types of antibiotics might be connected to flu, but weren't weighted as heavily.

Eventually, they began using the list of weighted search topics against real-time data coming in during the early part of 2008, trying to see if a rise in certain topics in a given region meant that flu was on the rise there. And as you can see in the chart above, the Google prediction (in black) was uncannily similar to the actual rise in flu cases in the region they picked (in red).

So what's the advantage of the Google system of disease surveillance? Traditional methods of disease tracking rely on data from hospitals and pharmacies, and often it takes a week or more to figure out any pattern. The Google system takes about a day. If epidemiologists see a huge spike in data that points to a massive disease outbreak, they can begin to prepare for it. And more importantly, they might be able to track where the disease is heading.

What this means is that the Centers for Disease control will probably hear about the next big pandemic from Google, rather than hospital researchers. It also means that when you do a search on Google, you're revealing a lot more information about yourself than you probably realize.

Detecting Influenza Outbreaks Using Search Query Data [via Nature]

HealthMap could be extra helpful in places where access to public health information is hard to come by. For instance China, whose official line for a while back in 2002 and 2003 was "SARS? I don't know what you're talking about. There' no one dying of a mysterious disease here."

And according to the Wired article, plans could be in the works to bring Healthmap down to the street level:

Back in 2006, Google.org head Larry Brilliant told Wired.com about his vision for a service that looks a lot like HealthMap.

"I envision a kid (in Africa) getting online and finding that there is an outbreak of cholera down the street. I envision someone in Cambodia finding out that there is leprosy across the street," Brilliant said.

HealthMap doesn't have quite that level of resolution just yet — outbreaks are only mapped to the state/province level...

Knowing about outbreaks as they happen is a good thing, and potentially really empowering, but HealthMappers and Larry Brilliant seem to be wandering into a privacy minefield.

A house-by-house account of who's got what disease would sure help out public health researchers, but what would it do to a community? Should I be able to find out who on my block has Hepatitis, Dengue Fever, or HIV? And to what extent is someone suffering from that disease allowed to not tell anyone about it? That's a tough question, but one that'll need answering before HealthMap goes hyper-local.

Source: PLoS Medicine via Wired

Today there are about 6.6 billion people on the planet and climbing fast (remember when we got to 6 billion...nine years ago??). It's hard to read the news and not come up with a laundry list of ways to destroy our civilization, if not all humanity.

So it's nice to know that humanity's a little more rugged than we thought. Here's what researchers from National Geographic Genographic Project had to say on the findings, which was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics:

Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA — which is passed down through mothers — have traced modern humans to a single ''mitochondrial Eve,'' who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.

The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa which appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago and the researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups which developed independently.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: ''Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction.''

Source: Associated Press, via PhysOrg

Millions of humans are infected with Leptospirosis every year, and the new strain could be spreading without detection. If new strains are transmitted beyond the relatively isolated jungle area where they were found, a catastrophic global pandemic could result.

There is no vaccine for humans, and treatment usually requires multiple antibiotics. Joseph Vinetz, M.D. was studying Leptospirosis in the Amazon region of Peru on behalf of the UC San Diego Division of Infectious Diseases when he discovered several humans and rats carrying the new strain. Dr. Vinetz fears that Leptospira licerasiae may have infected hundreds of humans in the remote region. Photo by: CDC.

New Species Of Infectious Disease Found In Amazon. [Science Daily]