Viruses, they do what they want…
07.03.2026 12:44
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Viruses, they do what they want…
Regulatory inertia is a powerful thing …
I mean if they have got any sort of continuous cell line from Asian elephants I’d like to try and see if eehv grows in it … but having personally watched my students fail at many, many attempts at even getting primary fibroblast to grow this is best described as truly ambitious
Oh lord … I can’t even… assisted reproduction in Asian elephants has only gotten as far as semen collection for artificial insemination and even then there is literally one bloke in the world who does it partly as it’s really fxxxxx dangerous
About time .. note this is not actually new or even research, but its the first time anyone’s been stubborn enough to push it through the uk regulatory processes
www.gov.uk/government/n...
Not a good thing if we are basing control, monitoring and modelling predictions around the wrong species...
Really sad to hear this, Robin was a a huge influence on so many of us, both his work and for me personally being kind enough to be interested in a bewildered new PIs work
Perhaps the intent is to see whose AI can actually write a coherent grant … short deadlines like this are such a colossal waste of time and money
Oh wow that’s bad , in any other country that results in people being sacked ( ask the head of West Midlands police)
Part of the problem is that with our diagnostics severely hampered its giving the impression there is a lot less out there (best guess is that the official cases are only around 1/3 and those are herd detections - doesn't tell you anything about actual numbers of animals
If I had sheep I'd be vaccinating for both BTV-3 and 8 this season. We will have a better idea of long term risk after this year but I wouldn't be willing to call it either way at present, we might get away with it or we might have something like the Netherlands two years ago....
Now this is a right mess - how to sink your national surveillance system by refusing to review pathogen classification when a disease moves from "exotic" to endemic
www.vettimes.com/news/vets/li...
Ah signs of spring… the cat left me a live frog in the hall this morning
The trick is to show them what they can do with it ( because let’s face it, coding itself is boring and frustrating)
This is pretty much how they do it in highschool courses ( it’s how my so sons gcse course is taught)
True… massively useful for disease and population research, if the resource is there to run a post mortem programme much of my work couldn’t happen without programmes like the Cardiff otter project
The plastic pinny was also pointless ( as is an fp3 mask if the face fit hasn’t been checked that it seals) but for reasons unknown that was nhs policy at the time and the uni followed that
Growing up in rural Aus you were indeed taught to kick any branches over before you picked them up ( the habit has never left me)
I remember the condensation dripping off the inside of the face shield, shouting through a mask and a face shield at 25 kids in a cow shed while wearing a plastic pinny over the usual waterproofs... one way system through the building, all support services, shops, gym etc shut.
Tested them all before they came in, if they got it the whole household was quarantined. Weekly testing, could only have 1/4 of the class in any space at one time (which meant the entire practical curriculum was taught 4x over plus the rest online). The animals spooked at the PPE.
We closed before the official shutdown as parents were pulling the kids out and taking them home anyway. We were the actually the first ones back (as we run a summer cohort) - took us two months of arguing about risk assessments and testing to get them back on site at all
I'm especially happy I managed to sneak an 1802 satirical cartoon from my son's GCSE history course into an editorial on Avian Influenza communications
bvajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
I certainly got rather drunk when mine came through (though it was a few years ago now). In my case it was probably just sheer relief at not to have to deal with the home office again...
I'm sure it works.. think I'm just getting old and cynical about the very large gap between what is possible and what the large vaccine manufacturers think is marketable....
Though the problem with the alphavirus vectors will be convincing various regulatory bodies that they aren't terrorism agents..... (that risk assessment will attract a horrific amount of scrutiny) . I mean half the vet vaccines are still inactivated whole virus - we've got a way to go....
Once upon a time in another life I worked on oral contraceptives for possums … we didn’t have cinnamon Oreo’s to tempt them though
Oh God... problem number one "transparency" conflicts directly with most of the bloody anti-terrorism legislation... problem number 2. Regulating tens of thousands of microorganisms that are in our everyday environment and we are constantly exposed to is in practical reality impossible...
Its also not safe if you get the dose rate wrong. Or you have a genetic problem with MDR1. Ask your veterinarian why they don't self medicate with it...
I just went and looked at my old x account - its basically increasingly desperate conspiracy theory clickbait as there is no-one real left to talk to and the rest of the world is about as interested as they are in "who shot JFK?"
They actually don’t have much fear of people and will walk right up and sticky beak, some colonies are pretty heavily studied and while expensive it would be possible to vaccinate at least a portion of