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Scientists in Communist China are launching new experiments after discovering a batch of new viruses that could potentially infect humans. The never-before-seen viruses were found by Chinese scientists on a tropical island. The researchers who discovered the viruses were tasked by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with preparing the world for future pandemics. They took almost 700 samples from rodents living in Hainan, just off China’s southern coast. Eight novel viruses were uncovered in the CCP-funded project. One of the viruses belongs to the same family as Covid, researchers revealed. Experts said the discovered pathogens had a “high probability” of...

An infectious pathogen inside California’s pot farms is attacking cannabis plants and growing invisibly for months only to spoil a crop just as a farmer is ready to harvest. Scientists believe that it’s in nearly every pot farm in the state and could be causing billions of dollars in damages to the national weed economy. Hop-latent viroid, or HLVd, shrivels pot plants and reduce how much weight they produce by as much as 30%. It also destroys the amount of THC, pot’s most common active compound, that a plant produces, greatly reducing the value of affected plants. HLVd was first...

A subscriber asked me to write a post about my thoughts on Novavax because she “really trusts my judgement.” Flattered, I felt like I should share what they are. So here goes.Before any medical intervention, but especially in the case of a novel or barely tested one, a long standing practice of medical ethics is that informed consent must be obtained. The emphasis should be on the informed part and not the consent part. Note that informed consent has been one of the foundations of medical ethics, essentially an inviolable standard, or at least it used to be before this...

“The high-profile scientist who was fired from Canada’s top infectious disease lab collaborated with Chinese government scientists on inventions registered in Beijing, but closely related to her federal job,” reports National Post reporter Tom Blackwell.Xiangguo Qiu was “a long-time federal civil servant when the patents were registered in 2017 and 2019 for innovations related to the Ebola and Marburg viruses, key focuses of her work at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML),” according to Blackwell’s article. Qiu shipped a load of the deadly pathogens from the NML to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a likely source of the virus that...

If you're in a public restroom, you may not want to hang around too long, because lots of airborne pathogens are hanging around, too. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science conducted flush tests in a public restroom with both a toilet and a urinal. "After about three hours of tests involving more than 100 flushes, we found a substantial increase in the measured aerosol levels ... with the total number of droplets generated in each flushing test ranging up to the tens of thousands," said study co-author Siddhartha Verma. He is an assistant professor of...

The number of flea-born Typhus cases in Los Angeles has hit 107. So far this year 72 patients have been recorded by Los Angeles County Department of Public Health with a further 15 in Long Beach and 20 in Pasadena. In the 2000s there were around 20 cases recorded per year and analysts are putting the dramatic rise down to a 47 per cent increase in homelessness since 2012. One official in Long Beach told NBC News that almost half a million potential cases are 'under investigation.'

A delicious novelty food with an ugly name Sharon OosthoekGreat minds do not think alike, and thatÂ’s why universities and colleges are the mother of inventions. Click here for the rest of our Bright Ideas series. Click here for the rest of our Campus Food series.Barry Saville: Trent UniversityBarry Saville has spent much of his career figuring out how to stop fungi from infecting food crops. But for the past three years, the Trent University professor has been deliberately infecting corn with a fungus that produces large, whitish-grey kernels he believes have potential as a niche product for market farmers....

RISK GROUP CLASSIFICATION: Risk Group 4 (38). CONTAINMENT REQUIREMENTS: Containment Level 4 facilities, equipment, and operational practices for work involving infectious or potentially infectious materials, animals, and cultures. PROTECTIVE CLOTHING: Personnel entering the laboratory must remove street clothing, including undergarments, and jewellery, and change into dedicated laboratory clothing and shoes, or don full coverage protective clothing (i.e., completely covering all street clothing). Additional protection may be worn over laboratory clothing when infectious materials are directly handled, such as solid-front gowns with tight fitting wrists, gloves, and respiratory protection. Eye protection must be used where there is a known or potential...

....Virologists, using serologic and early genetic tests, soon began to suggest the cause of the reappearance was a laboratory escape of a 1949-50 virus, and as genomic techniques advanced, it became clear that this was true. By 2010, researchers published it as fact: “The most famous case of a released laboratory strain is the re-emergent H1N1 influenza-A virus which was first observed in China in May of 1977 and in Russia shortly thereafter.” The virus may have escaped from a lab attempting to prepare an attenuated H1N1 vaccine in response to the U.S. swine flu pandemic alert..... In 2007, Foot...

Fears are growing that the most lethal form of the Ebola virus can mutate into an airborne pathogen, making the spread of the terrifying disease more difficult to check. It was previously thought the untreatable virus, which causes massive internal bleeding and multiple organ failure, could only be transmitted through contact with infected blood. But now Canadian researchers have carried out experiments showing how monkeys can catch the deadly disease from infected pigs without coming into direct contact.k

WASHINGTON: US researchers reported that they may have found a way to flush out herpes viruses from hiding — offering a potential way to cure pesky and painful conditions from cold sores to shingles. They discovered that a mysterious gene carried by the herpes simplex-1 virus — the one that causes cold sores — allows the virus to lay low in the nerves it infects. It does so via microRNAs, little pieces of genetic material that regulate the activity of many viruses, the researchers report in the journal Nature. It may be possible to "wake up" the virus and then...

New York agriculture authorities have come down hard on yet another local dairy farmer for supposedly selling milk with a pathogen. But this farmer claims it's part of a state-sponsored fear campaign, and vows to fight the state by refusing to pay the expected $300 fine.