Tagged: disease

Note to the Havelock North Inquiry – Think Big - Public Health Expert

Public Health Expert • Sep 26, 2016 •

• agriculture,
• Climate,
• disease,
• Drinking water,
• e coli,
• Havelock North,
• public health,
• Water quality,
• water-borne disease

Prof Alistair Woodward, A/Prof Simon Hales An Independent Inquiry is now investigating the cause of the water-borne outbreak caused by Campylobacter in Havelock North. In this blog we consider the background to this issue and argue the Inquiry must not miss the opportunity to think up-stream, on the scale of water catchments, agricultural economies and climate systems. “Alarming new … Read More

This is how the flu spreads through your body - Up and Atom

Kimberley Collins • Aug 03, 2016 •

• disease,
• Flu,
• Health,
• winter

Take a journey through the microscopic world of a cell as these GIFs, taken from a video by NPR, show how the flu spreads through your body.  Viruses can’t survive by themselves and must seek out a living host to grow and multiply. They spread very easily and enter our bodies through the nose, mouth or breaks in the … Read More

Genetic detectives: how scientists use DNA to track disease outbreaks - Guest Work

Guest Work • May 02, 2016 •

• disease,
• DNA,
• epidemiology,
• infections,
• measles

By Emily Toth Martin, University of Michigan They’re the top questions on everyone’s mind when a new disease outbreak happens: where did the virus come from? When did this happen? How long has it been spreading in a particular country or group of people? These questions have been the foundation of epidemiology, the study of the occurrence and … Read More

Disease evolution: our long history of fighting viruses - Guest Work

Guest Work • Apr 27, 2016 •

• disease,
• evolution,
• vaccination,
• virus

By Peter C. Doherty, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity A virus is essentially an information system (encoded in DNA or RNA) surrounded by a protective coat and shaped by evolution to ensure its own replication and survival. Viruses grow only in living cells. But they infect everything from the simplest, single-cell organisms, such as … Read More

Getting ahead of a potentially deadly salamander disease - News

Sarah-Jane O'Connor • Dec 11, 2015 •

• amphibians,
• biosecurity,
• disease,
• frogs,
• fungal pathogen,
• salamander

A fungal pathogen with the potential to devastate salamander populations has yet to arrive in North America, but scientists are ready and waiting should it appear. New Zealand researchers are among a group calling for global action against the emerging disease before it spreads. Scientists in Europe discovered the fungal pathogen, Salamander chytrid disease – Batrachocytrium … Read More

A "GoogleMAP" of Microbes - Molecular Matters

Michael Edmonds • Dec 05, 2013 •

• disease,
• dorrestein,
• microbiome

This week I attended the 2013 New Zealand Institute of Chemistry conference in Wellington which was great. There were a some fantastic talks and probably the most memorable for me was a talk by Professor Pieter Dorrestein from the University of California, San Diego. The title of the talk was “A GoogleMAP”-type molecular map of microbes – from culture to … Read More

Every 13 seconds a person contracts HIV - Visibly Shaken

Peter Griffin • Dec 03, 2013 •

• AIDS,
• disease,
• hiv

December 1 was World AIDS Day. While AIDS isn’t a widespread disease in New Zealand – the incidence in the population is just 0.3 people per 100,000, it is a major killer in other parts of the world. This infographic charts the history of the disease and its current status… Click image to open interactive … Read More

A new entity is born: CDaR - Kidney Punch

John Pickering • Aug 29, 2013 •

• Acute Kidney Injury,
• bias,
• Big Data,
• Biomarkers,
• Clinical Data Research,
• Data,
• Databases,
• disease,
• Drugs,
• Kidney Attack,
• medicine,
• my work,
• personalized medicine

Have you ever been told the blood test is positive and the disease in question is shocking – Cancer, an STD (but you don’t sleep around!), MS?  Have you every wondered why it is that some drugs get withdrawn years after, and millions of prescriptions after, they were first approved?  Surely, you’ve read a headline … Continue reading → … Read More

What's the Difference between Science and Pseudoscience? Part 2 - Molecular Matters

Michael Edmonds • Jul 10, 2013 •

• ayurvedic,
• causes,
• disease,
• medicine,
• pseudoscience,
• Science

In a previous blog I suggested that one difference between science and pseudoscience is that pseudoscience can’t move on when evidence comes along which disproves its’ ideas: science does. Another difference is that science attempts to, and is usually successful, in working out the underlying mechanism to explain the evidence. Take for example the field of medicine. Early explanations … Read More

Astrosquid! - Infectious Thoughts

Siouxsie Wiles • Mar 27, 2013 •

• Animation,
• bacteria,
• bioluminescence,
• disease,
• Euprymna scolopes,
• Hawaii,
• Hawaiian bobtail squid,
• Kathryn Ryan,
• light,
• Luke Harris,
• microbes,
• microorganisms,
• Nine to Noon,
• quorum sensing,
• Radio New Zealand National,
• SfAM,
• Society for Applied Microbiology,
• squid,
• Vibrio,
• Vibrio fischeri,
• You Tube

What is the value of blue-skies research? This is a question often asked by politicians and the public. Why should public money be spent funding science that seems to have no obvious benefit beyond generating scientific knowledge? The simple answer is that it can be almost impossible to predict what new avenues that scientific knowledge will open up. Take … Read More