Credit Ian M. Mackay At VDU MERS-CoV
# 7377
When Revere at Effect Measure ceased blogging in May of 2010 - after a run of nearly 6 years - Flublogia lost its most expert blogger. The EM archive is still online, and very much worth visiting, but the gap left by Revere’s departure has been sorely felt.
Although less prolific, Flublogia sported another expert science blogger; Dr. Ian York of the Mystery Rays blog. But his move to a research post at the CDC has greatly limited his blogging over the past couple of years.
We still have Vincent Racaniello and his Virology Blog (which I highly recommend, along with his TWiV and TWiP podcasts), but his focus is broader, and less devoted to flu (and now MERS).
Luckily, over the past few months, Flublogia has gained a new expert blogger; Dr. Ian M. Mackay - associate professor of clinical virology at the University of Queensland – who runs the Virology Down Under website.
Ian quite nicely fills the expertise gap left by Revere, one that Crof and I simply cannot. If visiting his blog is not part of your daily schedule, it really ought to be.
Last night Helen Branswell brought us two articles on how the Saudi’s are frustrating attempts of scientists to understand the emerging MERS coronavirus.
- Her SciAm article Saudi Silence on Deadly MERS Virus Outbreak Frustrates World Health Experts
- Canadian Press report Saudi paperwork demands delay work to research to find MERS source: CDC
Overnight, Ian weighed in on these revelations and what KSA needs to do to unclog the discovery process. I’ve only included an excerpt, so follow the link to read it in its entirety.
8 months and US CDC still waiting on their MERS-CoV samples from the KSA.
This is the most ironic thing I've read about the MERS story so far. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been holding up shipping human samples collected by the CDC team that visited it in October 2012, because of the time its taking to process the MTA paperwork they are making the US CDC researchers sign.
See May's posts for more about MTAs.
Combine this latest revelation with Prof Ziad Memish's previous comments that the KSA is "struggling with diagnostics" because researchers at Erasmus Medical Center had patented everything MERS-CoV (they hadn't) and his comments intimating that the MERS-CoV isn't a KSA-centric virus (it clearly is).
Its easy to see why researchers are so frustrated with the KSA over its lack of transparency. Its just an ongoing symptom of a disease that is rendering moribund, the world's ability to conduct good public health research on this still very poorly characterised new respiratory virus.
What would it take for scientists to be happier with KSA? Some of my thoughts:
By all means, keep reading down the blog for earlier postings, and be sure to bookmark it, along with the VDU H7N9 and VDU MERS-CoV pages as well.
A final note, for those who may have wondered:
Revere is alive and well, remains quite busy in his field in academia, and is still engaged watching avian flu and the newly emerging MERS-CoV.
