A Global Lab Against Influenza

Abstract

uring any given year, influenza epidemics kill 500,000 to 1,000,000 people worldwide, and an unpredictable pandemic could kill millions more. Yet such statistics do not reflect influenza's full impact: millions of hospitalizations, secondary bacterial pneumonias, and middle ear infections in infants and young children. The World Health Organization (WHO) Influenza Program was established in 1948 to deal with these public health threats. Today, 111 national centers in 83 countries collect and screen about 175,000 samples each year from an estimated 600 to 1200 million cases of influenza worldwide, and four WHO collaborating centers receive about 6500 samples for further immunologic and genetic characterizations. Twice yearly, WHO organizes formal meetings to identify circulating strains that new vaccine formulations should target. After review by national health authorities, vaccine manufacturers have roughly 6 months for scale-up, production, and distribution. Health care services then have another 3 months to administer about 200 million doses of trivalent vaccine worldwide. Despite its sophistication, however, the WHO Influenza Program has limitations. First, current lab methods for characterizing influenza are timeconsuming and labor-intensive. Only a small fraction of influenza virus isolates undergo definitive characterization. Second, it could take weeks or months to detect and analyze an unusual or unexpected strain and to understand its significance. Delays can be costly or disastrous. A meeting* organized under the auspices of the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering has resulted in a plan that would expedite disease surveillance and intervention efforts on an international scale. It integrates biological, engineering, and informatic technologies into a centralized facility and makes them available via the Internet. WHO national centers would be able to collect samples, screen them on the spot with dipsticks, record epidemiologic observations on positives, select appropriate tests, and ship samples directly to the global lab. High-throughput automated systems for replicating, phenotyping, genotyping, and archiving influenza viruses would work together and, within days, epidemiologic observations and test results would appear in the lab's Web-enabled database for analysis. Within several years, such a global lab would generate a petabit-sized (about 10 15 bits) database on influenza viruses worldwide, allowing rapid and consistent monitoring of circulating strains for vaccine development, serving as a pandemic sentinel, and expanding surveillance to animals known to harbor strains that could spread to humans. The global lab could be implemented over 5 years at a projected cost of U.S. $45 million. Although this investment may seem high, it will pay for itself many times over in morbidity prevented and lives saved through influenza vaccines that are better matched to the circulating strains and thus more effective. The building block technologies to create the first global lab against ...

Rivers dam waves of rabies

“…Apart from these applied benefits, the wonderful disease notification data often collected for parasite and host populations (7) allow us to test basic ideas in spatiotemporal population dynamics (17). The next few years should be particularly exciting, given the potential to collect routine data synthesizing, in exquisite spatiotemporal detail, the epidemiology, and molecular ecology of infectious diseases (18). Such an exercise requires staying power, but could be one of the most important outcomes of the genomic revolution for pure and applied population biology.…”

Glucosyl Hesperidin Prevents Influenza A Virus Replication <i>in Vitro</i> by Inhibition of Viral Sialidase

“…1) Four influenza pandemics occurred in the 20th century and caused more than 20-50 million of deaths. The World Health Organization is working to stockpile antiviral drugs for prevention of possible pandemics.…”

Influenza A Virus-Infected Hosts Boost an Invasive Type ofStreptococcus pyogenesInfection in Mice

“…This seasonality has also been well documented in many countries, with influenza epidemics generally occurring from December to March in the northern hemisphere (3). Influenza virus infection alone is rarely lethal; however, it can promote secondary bacterial infections that are often fatal (21). Based on these findings, we examined whether nonlethal influenza A virus (IAV) infection in mice affects the outcome after superinfection with GAS in order to better understand the etiology of severe invasive GAS infection.…”