WHO Declares H1N1 Pandemic; U.S. Vaccine Efforts Under Way

Officials of the World Health Organization on 11 June raised the worldwide pandemic alert level to Phase 6 for the influenza A (H1N1) virus, thus indicating that a global pandemic is under way. That declaration is a reminder that this and similar viruses "need to be taken seriously," says Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "We need to start preparing now in order to be ready for a possible H1N1 immunization campaign starting in late September." A few weeks earlier, she designated about $1 billion for possible commercialscale production of an adjuvant as well as an appropriate H1N1 antigen for a vaccine to help control this virus later this year. Some of that money is set aside for small-scale clinical trials to evaluate early versions of that vaccine.

Recent Findings on the Human Infectious Disease Front

Recent noteworthy findings on the infectious disease front include:

● A genetic variant on human chromosome 9 appears to link periodontitis with a risk for coronary heart disease, according to Arne Schaefer of the University of Kiel in Germany and his collaborators; he spoke during a recent meeting of the European Society of Human Genetics.

● A newly recognized member of the arenavirus family, the hemorrhagic Lujo virus, was responsible for infecting five individuals, four of them fatally, in Zambia and South Africa in 2008, according to Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York, N.Y., and his collaborators; details of their work appear online May 28 in PLoS Pathogens.

● Neurofibrillary tangles taken from brains of Alzheimer's patients induce similar tangles when injected into brains of mice, suggesting that this condition is transmissible in much the same way as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease by prions in humans, according to Markus Tolnay of University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and collaborators, whose report appears in May in Nature Cell Biology.

● Cells of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the agent of tuberculosis, intoxicate human host cells by producing adenylate cyclase, making cAMP, and thus disrupting host-cell signaling pathways, according to William Bishai of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md. and collaborators, whose report appears in the 11 June Nature.

IOM Report Urges Expanding U.S. Spending on Global Health

The United States should increase its funding for overseas disease prevention and treatment to $15 billion per year by 2012, not only to meet humanitarian goals but also from self-interest in meeting its own health, economic, and security needs, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in Washington, D.C. The increase would provide $13 billion per year for health-related millennium development goals, including treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, plus $2 billion for injuries and noncommunicable diseases, such as heart disease. The IOM committee also recommends that the President establish a White House interagency committee on global health to oversee such activities. The report, "The U.S. Commitment to Global Health: Recommendations for the Public and Private Sectors," is available at www.nap.edu.

Intense Microbial Heterogeneity in a Single Drop of Brine

A set of 153 Halorubrum spp. strains is amazingly heterogeneous in terms of the capacity of different strains to metabolize different nutrient sources but are nearly indistinguishable in terms of the diversity of their 16S ribosomal RNA or their rhodopsin genes, according to Thane Papke of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who spoke during the symposium, "The Origin of Microbial Species: 150 Years of Perspective," convened during the 109th ASM General Meeting, held last May in Philadelphia, Pa. "No two strains have the same profile, and each is using a different set of substrates, even though all the strains can live in the same drop of water," he says. "Every cell is its own ecotype." Further, within such a small pool, "recombination is an extremely important force-more important than mutation-and it is both a homogenizing force and a force for diversification, allowing organisms to partition at the cellular level."

 

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