We had our virology seminar discussion today, which was sort of fitting given the swine flu is hitting a place about an hour south of here. If you squint and ignore the fact that we were covering positive strand RNA viruses, such as polio, and I'm not entirely sure if what we learned was applicable at all. However, in our discussion we did get into an interesting conversation about how viruses leave cell, which largely depends on the type of viruses. Based on Kirkgaard's (I may have butchered her lastname) research on cytoplasmic leakage, we were wondering whether or not it's possible for multiple viruses to be leaked out together at once, in a vesicle (like a sac where the sac is the plasmic membrane), which caused my classmates to coin the idea of the viruses "going green" and carpooling and therefore promptly made it impossible to continue the thread of conversation seriously. (I didn't mind.)
We also discussed FMDV. (Turned out we had someone who used to work on anti-virals in the industry before he came to grad school. Huh.) One of my classmates, who grew up in Britain, announced that given all evidences of the recent years clearly UK should just stop raising cattle.
While we're talking about contagious viruses, XKCD, as usual, has its own thoughts about it. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh, because that is hilarious. Cry, because I can actually imagine people writing stuff like that. (Evidence? Youtube video comments. My hope for humanity dies a little every time I read them.)
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