Though my writing life ranges from writing health stories for teens to writing about research topics and careers issues for scientists, the sources that I speak with for the former type of article generally don’t overlap with those for the latter. Until now. Last spring, I was working on an article about the common cold,…
Okay, so I’m officially geeking out with a new idea for a regular blog feature. But here it is, Molecule of the Week! What you see before you is a ball and stick model of oseltamivir, the drug Tamiflu, your friendly neighborhood antiviral drug for influenza, including H1N1. How does this bad boy work? Flu…
As swine flu concern seems to be simmering down a little, I want to highlight some of the interesting stories about science that should make a difference in infectious disease science, whether H1N1 turns out to be the next dangerous pandemic or not. 1. Why is the flu seasonal? Honestly, I was thinking about this…
Looking more closely at the some of the coverage of swine flu, I recognized the (probable) handiwork of a CDC researcher from a lecture I covered recently at the New York Academy of Sciences about biological imaging. Amazingly this technology (negative stained transmission electron micrograhs) actually dates back to the 1950s, but it’s fast and…