Happy Halloween from all at the CVR! About this time last year in 2016 we made an episode of Contagious Thinking (which I encourage you all to have a listen to/see link at the end) about vampire bats and the deadly rabies virus that they can carry and spread across Latin America. Vampire bats can… Continue reading
*** Please fill in this questionnaire about the podcast and how it can be improved in the future. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQL…/viewform?c=0&w=1 *** Is HIV and AIDS still important? Every year, the first of December marks World AIDS day (history here). AIDS, or acquired deficiency syndrome , is a serious viral disease that results from infection with Human Immunodeficiency… Continue reading
The 28th of September marked the 10th World Rabies Day, and this year’s theme was “Rabies; Educate. Vaccinate. Eliminate.” While most global efforts aimed at rabies control focus on spread by dogs and other carnivores, the Streicker lab working in the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, and the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and… Continue reading
The fight against the HIV/AIDS pandemic has myriad weapons at its disposal, such as educational tools; cheap and effective diagnostics; and antiviral drugs used to suppress virus replication, stop disease and onward transmission, but one thing that has proven to be very difficult is curing all the people infected who are unable to eliminate the virus. The difficulty here is… Continue reading
Professor Steve Goodbourn, from St George’s, University of London, talks with PhD students Joanna Morrell and Yasmin Parr about his his work on unravelling the biochemical mysteries of how viruses unravel the innate immune system of their hosts. Steve’s work has been integral to our understanding of how some of the most dangerous viruses can infect… Continue reading
Is the ebolavirus mutating to become more transmissible in humans? Why was Zika virus able to move across the world so rapidly? Why are some viruses able to spread via aerosols floating in the air? While these may all appear to be very distinct questions, there is one major factor that connects them: the concept… Continue reading
In this episode we talk with Dr Mike Weekes, a clinical consultant and Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Mike visited the CVR a few weeks ago and gave a wonderful seminar about his lab’s work on using a technique he pioneered called ‘quantitative temporal viromics’ (which is a kind of… Continue reading
“While arboviruses do not generally cause recognisable disease in their arthropod vectors they often do in vertebrates, in particular warm-blooded vertebrates like primates like us and livestock. “ As classically defined, arboviruses have both arthropod and non-arthropod hosts. Whilst insects/ticks may have legs, jaws and eyes etc., they are clearly very different to their vertebrate hosts, such as… Continue reading
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that nearly 1.5 million people die each year from viral hepatitis. To give you some context, that’s the entire population of Trinidad and Tobago dying each year, and is equivalent to 4000 deaths each and every day. Many of these infections are preventable but most people do not… Continue reading
Veronica Rezelj, Ph.D. student in the Elliott lab, interviewed Paul Duprex (@10queues) when he visited us at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. Paul is a Professor of Microbiology at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory (NEIDL) in Boston University. His research involves understanding the molecular basis of pathogenesis and attenuation of respiratory… Continue reading
