The filovirus tree has been shooting wildly

While there are not a lot of new branches, there are many, many new leaves on this growing tree. That is overwhelmingly due to the fantastic work of Dr Pardis Sabeti, and Stephen Gire at the Sabeti lab, Harvard University, and their many collaborators. It sounds like even more sequences will...

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Are fewer Ebola virus disease cases being confirmed than previously?

A very quick graph plotting the proportion (percentage, %) of laboratory-confirmed Ebola virus disease (EVD) cases reported by the WHO over time. That is, the of samples taken from clinically suspected EVD cases that are RT-PCR positive for Ebola virus in a given report, divided by the total number...

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Societal change and H7N9..

The importance of societal change for controlling infectious disease outbreaks really cannot be over-stated. For Ebola virus disease, it came down to stopping the tradition of direct contact with the body of those who have died and dircet contact in general. For MERS it seems that occasional camel...

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