54 posts · 42,701 views
Contagions
54 posts
Sort by Latest Post, Most Popular
View by Condensed, Full
- April 7, 2013
- 12:55 PM
- 85 views
Fleshing out Yersinia pestis
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Up until a few months ago there were a few representative samples of the Yersinia pestis genome. Important windows into its secrets, but windows none the less. In January a Chinese group remedied this situation by expanding the number of fully sequenced genomes from 15 to 133 (Cui et al, 2013). China supplied 107 genomes [...]... Read more »
Cui, Y., Yu, C., Yan, Y., Li, D., Li, Y., Jombart, T., Weinert, L., Wang, Z., Guo, Z., Xu, L.... (2012) Historical variations in mutation rate in an epidemic pathogen, Yersinia pestis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(2), 577-582. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1205750110
Rajanna C, Ouellette G, Rashid M, Zemla A, Karavis M, Zhou C, Revazishvili T, Redmond B, McNew L, Bakanidze L.... (2013) A Strain of Yersinia pestis With a Mutator Phenotype from the Republic of Georgia. FEMS microbiology letters. PMID: 23521061
Vogler, A., Chan, F., Nottingham, R., Andersen, G., Drees, K., Beckstrom-Sternberg, S., Wagner, D., Chanteau, S., & Keim, P. (2013) A Decade of Plague in Mahajanga, Madagascar: Insights into the Global Maritime Spread of Pandemic Plague. mBio, 4(1). DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00623-12
- January 20, 2013
- 05:28 PM
- 79 views
Reactivation of Ancient Plague Foci in Libya, 2009
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Plague has been called a re-emerging disease primarily because cases have begun to appear in areas where plague has been absent for decades. Two recent surprising outbreaks occurred in Algeria, where plague had been absent for over 50 years, and in Libya after a 25 year absence. A team led by the Institut Pasteur explored [...]... Read more »
Cabanel, N., Leclercq, A., Chenal-Francisque, V., Annajar, B., Rajerison, M., Bekkhoucha, S., Bertherat, E., & Carniel, E. (2013) Plague Outbreak in Libya, 2009, Unrelated to Plague in Algeria. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 19(2), 230-236. DOI: 10.3201/eid1902.121031
- November 28, 2012
- 12:17 AM
- 106 views
Siberian Mummy Yields 300-year-old Smallpox DNA
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
It was the mass grave that got their attention. Four bodies crammed into one casket, with one child outside but with the casket. Multiple graves are not common in Yakutia, Siberia. Examination of the late 17th to early 18th century mummies indicates that burial came quickly after death. The casket contains one adult male over [...]... Read more »
Biagini, P., Thèves, C., Balaresque, P., Géraut, A., Cannet, C., Keyser, C., Nikolaeva, D., Gérard, P., Duchesne, S., Orlando, L.... (2012) Variola Virus in a 300-Year-Old Siberian Mummy. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(21), 2057-2059. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc1208124
- November 4, 2012
- 07:24 PM
- 92 views
Leprosy in Medieval Scandinavia
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Leprosy is an ancient disease. References to leprosy and the social stigma attached to it go back to 600 BC from India and in the Old Testament. However, like the plague, it was not until relatively late (1873) that the term leprosy became attached to a particular microbe, Mycobacterium leprae. Although some medieval descriptions suggest [...]... Read more »
Economou, C., Kjellström, A., Lidén, K., & Panagopoulos, I. (2013) Ancient-DNA reveals an Asian type of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Scandinavia. Journal of Archaeological Science, 40(1), 465-470. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2012.07.005
- October 22, 2012
- 07:00 AM
- 172 views
Enzootic Plague and the Great Gerbil of Central Asia
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Meet the Great Gerbil The Great Gerbil of Central Asia is not much like the little gerbils found in American pet stores. This bad boy can get as long as 13 inches head to tail, about the size of a prairie dog or large black rat. It holds a similar ecological niche as the prairie [...]... Read more »
Zhang Y, Dai X, Wang X, Maituohuti A, Cui Y, Rehemu A, Wang Q, Meng W, Luo T, Guo R.... (2012) Dynamics of Yersinia pestis and Its Antibody Response in Great Gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) by Subcutaneous Infection. PloS one, 7(10). PMID: 23071647
- September 16, 2012
- 09:00 AM
- 102 views
Insights from Plague Genomics, Part 1: The Chromosome
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Most of the news lately has been about the plague phylogenetic tree produced by looking at single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The plague tree is remarkably simple and can lead to the mistaken impression that the rest of plague genomics are/will be simple. Michel Drancourt has recently compiled an array of genomic information that shows that [...]... Read more »
Drancourt, M. (2012) Plague in the genomic era. Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 224-230. info:/
- August 15, 2012
- 07:00 AM
- 136 views
When Yellow Fever Came to the Americas
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
In the early Americas, nothing scared people more than when Yellow Jack came knocking at the door of their city. Yellow Jack, or as we know it better today Yellow Fever, has rightly been called the plague of the Americas. It has long been assumed that yellow fever came to the Americas with its vector, [...]... Read more »
J E Bryant, E C Holmes, & A D T Barrett. (2007) Out of Africa: A Molecular Perspective on the Introduction of Yellow Fever Virus into the Americas. PLOS Pathogens, 3(5). info:/doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.0030075
Auguste A. J., Lemey P., Pybus O. G., Suchard M. A., Salas R. A., Adesiyun A. A., Barrett A. D., Tesh R. B., Weaver S. C., & Carrington C. V. F. (2010) Yellow Fever Virus Maintenance in Trinidad and Its Dispersal throughout the Americas. Journal of Virology, 84(19), 9977. DOI: 10.1128/JVI.00588-10
- August 7, 2012
- 07:00 AM
- 339 views
The Landscape of Super-Spreading
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Super-spreading individuals and disease hot spots have been known for over a century, but rarely have they been considered together. Sara Paull and colleagues [1] have pulled together all of the recent work the ecology of disease hot spots and transmission heterogeneity (super spreading) to explore the continuum between individual transmission heterogeneity and the landscape [...]... Read more »
Paull, S., Song, S., McClure, K., Sackett, L., Kilpatrick, A., & Johnson, P. (2012) From superspreaders to disease hotspots: linking transmission across hosts and space. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 10(2), 75-82. DOI: 10.1890/110111
Hawley, D., & Altizer, S. (2011) Disease ecology meets ecological immunology: understanding the links between organismal immunity and infection dynamics in natural populations. Functional Ecology, 25(1), 48-60. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2435.2010.01753.x
Pepper John W., & Rosenfeld Simon. (2012) The emerging medical ecology of the human gut microbiome. Trends in Ecology , 27(7), 384. DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2012.03.002
- July 29, 2012
- 04:34 PM
- 304 views
Metagenomics, Lyme Disease, and the Tyrolean Iceman’s Tattoos
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
When the genetic analysis of the 5,300 year old Tyrolean Iceman, better known as Ötzi, was published in February, most of the attention was naturally focused on his genomic DNA. His genomic DNA produced some interesting results: he had brown eyes, blood type O+, was probably lactose intolerant and from a southern European gene pool. [...]... Read more »
Keller, A., Graefen, A., Ball, M., Matzas, M., Boisguerin, V., Maixner, F., Leidinger, P., Backes, C., Khairat, R., Forster, M.... (2012) New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman's origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing. Nature Communications, 698. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1701
- June 28, 2012
- 07:30 AM
- 439 views
Plague at the Siege of Caffa, 1346
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
The first stage of the Black Death among Europeans was said to begin with the whoosh of a Mongol trebuchet. Gabriele De’ Mussi, a lawyer from near Genoa writing in about 1348, is believed to have recorded the account of the earliest use of plague as weapon of war at Caffa in 1346. “The dying [...]... Read more »
Wheelis M. (2002) Biological warfare at the 1346 siege of Caffa. Emerging infectious diseases, 8(9), 971-5. PMID: 12194776
- June 10, 2012
- 01:20 AM
- 428 views
Achtman on Plague Evolution
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Mark Achtman who led the international team that assembled the phylogenetic tree for Yersinia pestis participated in a Royal Society meeting on ‘Immunity, infection, migration and human evolution’ in June 2011. Achtman’s contribution placed plague evolution within the context of other ‘monomorphic’ pathogens. Here are some of my notes from his published contribution: Monomorphic pathogens [...]... Read more »
Achtman, M. (2012) Insights from genomic comparisons of genetically monomorphic bacterial pathogens. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367(1590), 860-867. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0303
Morelli G, Song Y, Mazzoni CJ, Eppinger M, Roumagnac P, Wagner DM, Feldkamp M, Kusecek B, Vogler AJ, Li Y.... (2010) Yersinia pestis genome sequencing identifies patterns of global phylogenetic diversity. Nature genetics, 42(12), 1140-3. PMID: 21037571
Haensch S, Bianucci R, Signoli M, Rajerison M, Schultz M, Kacki S, Vermunt M, Weston DA, Hurst D, Achtman M.... (2010) Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the black death. PLoS pathogens, 6(10). PMID: 20949072
- May 7, 2012
- 12:02 AM
- 731 views
Leptin: Linking Malnutrition and Vulnerability to Infection
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
The correlation between malnutrition and vulnerability to infection has been well established (discussed previously here). While the immune dysfunction could be characterized it was not until the last 10-15 years that an exact mechanism began to resolve. It all began with the discovery of a new hormone called leptin from an unexpected place, adipose tissue [...]... Read more »
Cava, A., & Matarese, G. (2004) The weight of leptin in immunity. Nature Reviews Immunology, 4(5), 371-379. DOI: 10.1038/nri1350
Procaccini C, Jirillo E, & Matarese G. (2012) Leptin as an immunomodulator. Molecular aspects of medicine, 33(1), 35-45. PMID: 22040697
- April 29, 2012
- 09:30 AM
- 568 views
Tracking a Live Yersinia pestis Infection with Bioluminescence
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
The day has finally arrived when an experimental infection can be tracked real-time over the entire course of the infection. Developing a natural history of a rapidly lethal infectious disease has been a challenge because individual variation clouds the progression and individuals can only be studied after death. The traditional method to study these infections [...]... Read more »
Nham, T., Filali, S., Danne, C., Derbise, A., & Carniel, E. (2012) Imaging of Bubonic Plague Dynamics by In Vivo Tracking of Bioluminescent Yersinia pestis. PLoS ONE, 7(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034714
- March 23, 2012
- 07:00 AM
- 706 views
Primary Pneumonic Plague Transmission in the USA, 1900-2009
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Pneumonic plague is a difficult phenomenon to model. We really don’t have much data from the modern medical era. Hinckley et al. (2012) argue that most of the data studied to date has been biased by taking it from well-established epidemics. To better study all transmission conditions, they gathered all of the cases of primary [...]... Read more »
Hinckley AF, Biggerstaff BJ, Griffith KS, & Mead PS. (2012) Transmission dynamics of primary pneumonic plague in the USA. Epidemiology and infection, 140(3), 554-60. PMID: 21733272
- March 14, 2012
- 07:15 PM
- 545 views
What makes a Super-Spreader?
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Parameters that should be theoretically equal often aren’t so in the real world. Ideally everyone should have the same potential to transmit an infection during a given outbreak, but it has long been observed that this isn’t true. Super-spreaders play an extraordinary role in driving outbreaks of infectious disease. A super-spreader is a person who [...]... Read more »
Stein RA. (2011) Super-spreaders in infectious diseases. International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, 15(8). PMID: 21737332
Lloyd-Smith JO, Schreiber SJ, Kopp PE, & Getz WM. (2005) Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence. Nature, 438(7066), 355-9. PMID: 16292310
Galvani AP, & May RM. (2005) Epidemiology: dimensions of superspreading. Nature, 438(7066), 293-5. PMID: 16292292
- February 26, 2012
- 11:00 PM
- 690 views
Gothic Epidemiology? or Gothic Historiography?
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
I was reading David Mengel’s recent article on plague in Bohemia and he kept referring to this apparently well-known concept, gothic epidemiology. Being the early medieval geek that I am, my first thought was Ostrogoth or Visigoth, and what do they have to do with epidemiology, especially in Bohemia? Feeling that I was clearing missing [...]... Read more »
Getz FM. (1991) Black death and the silver lining: meaning, continuity, and revolutionary change in histories of medieval plague. Journal of the history of biology, 24(2), 265-89. PMID: 11612554
Mengel DC. (2011) A plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death. Past , 211(1), 3-34. PMID: 21961188
- February 25, 2012
- 10:20 PM
- 576 views
Generating Immunity to the Plague
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Its pretty amazing that we still don’t have a vaccine against the plague. Work still goes on and it hasn’t been easy by any means, but it really isn’t a priority that you hear about much. Vaccines developed to date have issues with side effects and the need for repeat immunizations to be protective against [...]... Read more »
Li B, Du C, Zhou L, Bi Y, Wang X, Wen L, Guo Z, Song Z, & Yang R. (2012) Humoral and Cellular Immune Responses to Yersinia pestis Infection in Long-Term Recovered Plague Patients. Clinical and vaccine immunology : CVI, 19(2), 228-34. PMID: 22190397
- February 18, 2012
- 01:23 PM
- 599 views
Plague Detection by Immuno-PCR
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
Once again the Marseille research group is pushing the bounds of plague detection. This time their target is looking for a more sensitive method of detecting non-nucleic acid biomolecules from Yersinia pestis, ‘the plague’. We have now moved into an era where PCR is being used in the mechanics of testing, rather than amplifying the [...]... Read more »
Malou, N., Tran, T., Nappez, C., Signoli, M., Le Forestier, C., Castex, D., Drancourt, M., & Raoult, D. (2012) Immuno-PCR - A New Tool for Paleomicrobiology: The Plague Paradigm. PLoS ONE, 7(2). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031744
- February 5, 2012
- 05:09 PM
- 601 views
Mapping Malaria in Anglo-Saxon England
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
England once looked very different. Much of southern Britain was marshland for most of the island’s occupied history. These bogs, fens, and marshes ensured that areas of virtual wilderness persisted from before Roman Britain through the Norman period and beyond. Despite the difficulties of using fenlands, these areas were not only occupied throughout the Anglo-Saxon [...]... Read more »
Gowland RL, & Western AG. (2011) Morbidity in the marshes: Using spatial epidemiology to investigate skeletal evidence for malaria in Anglo-Saxon England (AD 410-1050). American journal of physical anthropology. PMID: 22183814
- January 16, 2012
- 07:39 AM
- 503 views
Retrospective Diagnosis in the 21st Century
by Michelle Ziegler in Contagions
The way we make and think about retrospective diagnosis is changing. Over the last decade, laboratory results have become the preferred (maybe even mandatory) method of making a retrospective diagnosis [1]. To extrapolate a few positive laboratory results to cover an entire epidemic, it must correlate with reported signs and symptoms and ideally epidemiology. There [...]... Read more »
Little, L. (2011) Plague Historians in Lab Coats. Past , 213(1), 267-290. DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtr014
Mitchell, P. (2011) Retrospective diagnosis and the use of historical texts for investigating disease in the past. International Journal of Paleopathology, 1(2), 81-88. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2011.04.002
Raoult D. (2011) Molecular, epidemiological, and clinical complexities of predicting patterns of infectious diseases. Frontiers in microbiology, 25. PMID: 21687417
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
