Flu Mask

Via GeekPress: a mask spotted by Movin' Meat.

Google Flu

Via Google Web Clips: Elizabeth Landau at CNN.com/health reports on a new Google tool, Google Flu Trends.

Google's new public health initiative, Google Flu Trends, looks at the relative popularity of a slew of flu-related search terms to determine where in the U.S. flu outbreaks may be occurring.
"What's exciting about Flu Trends is that it lets anybody -- epidemiologists, health officials, moms with sick children -- learn about the current flu activity level in their own state based on data that's coming in this week," said Jeremy Ginsberg, the lead engineer who developed the site.

See also the Official Google Blog for details.

Pandemic Fiction

Via Futurismic: "Pandemic" by J. F. Bone is an old (1962) story from Analog about a pathologist working on a species-threatening pandemic with a new, grim (but still plucky) nurse. Copyright has apparently lapsed.

Generally, human beings don't do totally useless things consistently and widely. So--maybe there is something to it--
"We call it Thurston's Disease for two perfectly good reasons," Dr. Walter Kramer said. "He discovered it--and he was the first to die of it."

Parasites Unleashed

Via Boardgame News: Zygote Games has finally released Parasites Unleashed, a card game.

Become one of life's ultimate insiders! In PARASITES UNLEASHED! you control a wily parasite, racing to complete your life cycle, mate, and lay eggs before your opponents. Do all the entertainingly gross things real parasites do -- bore into vital organs, hide inside a blood cell, hitch a ride inside a mosquito, even take over your host's brain! But beware, because your enemies can add stages to your life cycle, and zap you with medicine!

Germ Quiz

Via a sick friend:

2,426,760How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard?

Harry Potter and the Incomplete Penetrance

Via Eye on DNA: Pondering Pikaia gives an overview of controversial theories on the genetics of wizardry.

First up: the genetics of wizardry. What makes a person a wizard, and not a muggle? There was actually some discussion in the journal Nature on this very topic, back in 2005: a letter (Craig, J. Dow, R. and Aitken, M. Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele. Nature. Vol 436: 776.) and a rebuttal letter (Dodd, A., Hotta, C. and Gardner, M. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Presumptions. Nature. Vol 437, p 318.).
The first letter claims that being being magical must depend upon a recessive allele. Wizards can have a variety of family histories: they can be born from a purely magical family, they can come from a strictly nonmagical family, or they can have one magical and one nonmagical parent (commonly scorned as "mudbloods" by haughty purebloods such as the Malfoys). Since wizards/witches can be born into muggle (nonmagical) families, Craig et al suggest that magical ability is a recessive trait (they designate the wizard allele as W and the muggle allele as M). They hypothesize that all wizards/witches are WW, which can result from a cross between two muggle "carriers" that are MW.

New Giant Microbes

GIANTmicrobes has some exciting new plushie microbes, including a cute curly Lyme disease and a red-eyed rabies virus.

Among their older products, E. coli is cute and timely, while TB is intriguingly horizontal.

Adopt A Microbe

Via Boing Boing: Adopt A Microbe.

Hola. I'm C. jejuni.
I am a curved Gram Negative rod.

You can find me in lots of domestic animals.
I am part of the normal bacterial flora of poultry and cattle.

The illustrations alone are a riot.

From the I Saw It On Ebay department...

Via GeekPress: YUMLUM's knitwear art gallery includes conjoined teddies for your conjoined twins.

Virtual Plague

The BBC reports on a virtual "corrupted blood" plague infecting the World of Warcraft. Despite attempts to eradicate the infection, the problem continues:

Blizzard tried to control the plague by staging rolling re-starts of all the servers supporting the Warcraft realms and applying quick fixes.
However, there are reports that this has not solved all the problems and that isolated pockets of plague are breaking out again.

Thanks to an unnamed source for the tip.

Malwarlaria

Slashdot reports on the spread of a PC-to-human virus, Malwarlaria.B.:

First discovered in the Far East in early 2004 Malwarlaria.A spread in cats and other whiskered creatures as they walked across the keyboards of infected PCs. Infected animals showed flu-like symptoms, slight hair-loss and the appearance of some darkened patches of skin, giving rise to Malwarlaria's other name, the 'Gorbachev virus.'
The mutated version, Malwarlaria.B, causes a similar reaction in humans.

Stuffed Plague

What's the perfect gift for the plague-blogger who has everything? Giant Microbes! Thanks to my personal Epidemic Santa for the Black Death and company.