Featured in Grist
"Another symptom of swine flu: instant amnesia" May 11, 2009
Swine Influenza Virus: Zoonotic Potential and Vaccination Strategies for the Control of Avian and Swine Influenzas
Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke
Read the veterinary literature on swine flu and you get a strong sense of what might be called vaccination treadmill: the hog industry is literally scrambling to generate new vaccines for the rapidly evolving flu strains that sweep through CAFOs. Writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases [PDF] in 2008, Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke of Iowa State University paint a stark picture: “A number of genetically diverse viruses are circulating in swine herds throughout the world and are a major cause of concern to the swine industry,” they write. “Influenza virus infections in swine and poultry are potential sources of viruses for the next pandemic among humans.”
Featured in New York Times
"Fear of a Swine Flu Epidemic in 1976 Offers Some Lessons, and Concerns, Today" May 8, 2009
Anti‐Ganglioside Antibody Induction by Swine (A/NJ/1976/H1N1) and Other Influenza Vaccines: Insights into Vaccine‐Associated Guillain‐Barré Syndrome
Irving Nachamkin, Sean V. Shadomy, Anthony P. Moran, Nancy Cox, Collette Fitzgerald, Huong Ung, Adrian T. Corcoran, John K. Iskander, Lawrence B. Schonberger, and Robert T. Chen
Irving Nachamkin, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, examined some 1976 vaccine that had been saved by a scientist in Texas. In a paper published last year in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, he and colleagues reported that mice given the vaccine made antibodies that reacted with gangliosides, which are components of nerve cells. An antibody attack on gangliosides is part of the disease mechanism of Guillain-Barré.
Featured in AFP
"Swine flu vaccine 'could be ready soon'" May 7, 2009
A Broadly Protective Vaccine against Globally Dispersed Clade 1 and Clade 2 H5N1 Influenza Viruses
Mary A. Hoelscher, Neetu Singh, Sanjay Garg, Lakshmi Jayashankar, Vic Veguilla, Aseem Pandey, Yumi Matsuoka, Jacqueline M. Katz, Ruben Donis, Suresh K. Mittal, and Suryaprakash Sambhara
The vaccine Mittal created for the bird flu worked on three different strains isolated over a seven-year period and was described in papers for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
Featured in Newsweek
"The Path of a Pandemic" http://www.newsweek.com/id/195692
Swine Influenza Virus: Zoonotic Potential and Vaccination Strategies for the Control of Avian and Swine Influenzas
Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke
Last year researchers from Iowa State University in Ames warned that pigs located in industrial-scale farms were being subjected to influenza infections from farm poultry, wild birds and their human handlers. Writing in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke said, "As a result of the constantly changing genetic makeup of individual influenza viruses in pigs, the U.S. swine industry is continually scrambling to respond to the influenza viruses circulating within individual production systems."
). In contrast, the level of MGC secretion‐specific tissue inhibitor, tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase (TIMP)–1, is lower (
). Mature MGCs secrete constitutively greater concentrations of MMP‐9 than do monocytes or macrophages (
). MGCs in tuberculous lymph‐node biopsy samples express high MMP‐9 levels adjacent to areas of necrosis, whereas TIMP‐1 is not detected. Thus, MGCs are potentially important sources of MMP‐9 secretion and may contribute to inflammatory tissue damage in human tuberculosis.