The Covid-19 Thread: News, Preparation Tips, Etc

lavaflow99

In search of the next vacation
So it looks like Americans probably won’t be allowed into the EU because we have the plague here. Also can’t go to Hawaii from the mainland without a two week quarantine.

Which makes perfect sense to me. The US has shows an inability to gain control of the virus unlike all those European and African countries so ain't no way I would allow anyone from the USA into my country.
 

gn1g

Well-Known Member
I was talking to an RN about it and she said it is designed to kill, period.

she said it makes the blood very thick and could/should've been called a blood disease. What they are calling recovered is awful, people are leaving the hosiptal with bags of meds and oxygen tanks. The virus attacks all of the organs and people are going thru several rounds of it. so it might be a breeze now but could flare up later and be much worse.
 

ThirdEyeBeauty

Well-Known Member
I wonder what are some of the explanations for the spike. To me, it seems things were scary with deaths in March and April. It seems so different now. To me, it seems people are getting positive testing without the major consequences as the beginning of the pandemic. It is so hard to get reliable information from the media. We know a little more about C19. Hospitals not running on politics are better able to treat those who develop serious illness. I believe the stress is hurting the health of people now. The presentation by media and government is strange and making no sense.
 

Shimmie

"God is the Only Truth -- Period"
Staff member
I wonder what are some of the explanations for the spike. To me, it seems things were scary with deaths in March and April. It seems so different now. To me, it seems people are getting positive testing without the major consequences as the beginning of the pandemic. It is so hard to get reliable information from the media. We know a little more about C19. Hospitals not running on politics are better able to treat those who develop serious illness. I believe the stress is hurting the health of people now. The presentation by media and government is strange and making no sense.
The media is making their bread and butter, lined with gold, with all of the 'fear' tactics. I'm in no way minimizing the seriousness of COVID19. But the media knows how to 'stir the pot' even when there's nothing in it to stir.

Again... I'm not minimizing Covid...not at all, nor the necessary precautions. It's most definitely a serious matter. My family and I are taking 'ALL' of the precautions. We're not playing games with it, just as we don't play games with other health issues. But the media is making serious 'bank' by adding to the stress and fear. Shame on them... banking upon human's well being.
 

mochalocks

Well-Known Member
Yes, my coworker in Houston caught Covid and her husband caught it. She said her youngest son had no symptoms besides pink eye that went away after about a week. My coworker only had covid for about 2 weeks. Her husband had it for 3 weeks.


Oh my. Sorry to hear this.
 

meka72

Well-Known Member

2/ His name was Lucas Rensko and he showed up in a warehouse where there were other “Taskers” earning about $20/hr ripping Chinese masks out of plastic bags and stuffing them into new ones that were identical but for one potentially deadly difference …

3/ The old packages were labeled in all caps “MEDICAL USE PROHIBITED.” The new bags didn’t have that warning.

BeforeAfter
4/ Medical workers’ best defense against a virus that ravages the body with horrifying complexity is a simple, but trustworthy, mask. But many thousands of these repackaged ones were potentially making their way into the Texas supply. Here's the warehouse:
6/ These are labeled AYM-KN95. Early on the FDA approved these for use in healthcare settings. But they were taken off the list in May. They’re nowhere near the 95% effective required - tested as low as 39% in CDC tests …

7/ More curious was a screenshot Rivera posted of a $2k payment from “BM.” One of his Facebook friends noted “looks like code for a drug deal.”
8/ So I pulled out my phone and looked for him on Venmo and was delighted to see all his transactions were public.

Someone named Brennan Mulligan was paying him and others on Venmo to repackage masks. Check it out …
9/ Turns out Mulligan is a successful San Francisco tech/apparel businessman. He runs SKYOU, whose 3D design software lets people customize apparel that ships directly from China …

10/ Makes sense, I thought. As I found in this story, a lot of apparel and textile businesses used China connections to make their way into the mask market. propublica.org/article/the-se…
11/ That “131 boxes to TDEM” is delivery of KN95s to the Texas Division of Emergency Management, Texas’ FEMA, which supplies to hospitals inundated with patients. As you can see … Texas is in trouble.
12/ Rivera and I talked on the phone at length. He agreed to meet in person but then cut off contact as my questions became more uncomfortable. Here’s some of what he told me …

13/ Mulligan had hired him through TaskRabitt to pick up masks arriving in Texas airports via Southwest Cargo jet. Some he delivered to TDEM, others needed to be repackaged.

14/ Rivera spoke as if it was just common sense. They needed to take MEDICAL USE PROHIBITED off the package so Texas could accept the masks. It’s not a big deal, he said, because Texas will inspect the masks. He said it was just red tape.

15/ As our conversations progressed, Rivera started to worry that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. He was desperate, he said. His main income - doing jobs via TaskRabbit - had dried up because of the pandemic.

16/ That’s when Rivera mentioned he and Mulligan had been contacted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“His analogy was you’re telling somebody you have a Ferrari but you’re selling a Honda,” Rivera said.

17/ “Are you worried you were complicit in a crime?” I asked

“The more we talk about it, yes,” he said.

Before he hung up and cut off communication, he added: “I’m not the brains of the operation, and I’m definitely not the wallet for it.”

18/ The wallet was Mulligan, who didn’t respond to my calls but sent some brief emails. He blamed the FDA’s flip-flopping on chinese masks and onerous Chinese customs regulations.

19/ He couldn’t get the masks out of China without the non-medical disclaimer, he explained. And the Texas emergency agency would reject anything that had the disclaimer.

20/ He and other mask brokers told me they shipped all these masks in after the FDA cleared a bunch of KN95s, but before they could sell them the FDA kicked a bunch of manufacturers off the list.

21/ So “the only solution,” he said, was to repackage masks. But problem was - the masks he was repackaging weren’t on the FDA’s list of masks OK’d for emergency use. Mulligan says he broke no U.S. laws.

22/ I told TDEM what I had learned and they confirmed Mulligan and Rivera had tried to sell the poor quality masks and Texas rejected them. TDEM’s vetting is really good, a spokesperson said.

23/ Mulligan tried to sell them to another guy, who was trying to sell masks to hospitals in Illinois, but the buyer told me he walked away when he learned they’d been repackaged.

24/ So Mulligan is stuck where a lot of opportunistic mask brokers are - with tons of sub-par masks that governments can’t and shouldn’t buy.

25/ Oh, yeah, and that Homeland Security investigation? The agency said it’s real, but the statement also reads like the law enforcement equivalent of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
26/ There’s a lot more detail in the story, some funny anecdotes and whatnot. I hope you’ll read it. propublica.org/article/he-rem…
27/ If you know more about PPE brokers and investors, shoot me a note: [email protected]

28/ and if you want to get our next big stories, sign up for propublica’s Big Story newsletter: go.propublica.org/bigstory-social
PS - it remains a mess out here in the Wild West of PPE trading - companies pooping up overnight, untested, some whose owners have questionable backgrounds. Federal agencies say they’re vetting these companies but we’ve found a ton of problems
https://www.propublica.org/article/...eapons-dealer-operating-out-of-someones-house
 
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ThirdEyeBeauty

Well-Known Member
Wishing everyone well in health. I am hoping someone will pull through who has been on vent in NYC. The hope was that the person did not have to use it but the hospital felt it was needed. The goal is to see how the person does without it in a day or two.

It's a bad feeling when you feel you cannot help. I like to encourage the use of vitamin D3 before one becomes sick because you never know how much it can help in times like these.

The treatment protocol in NYC is bothering me (I wanted to say something else).
 

ThirdEyeBeauty

Well-Known Member
I found this article that states part of the high mortality rate was due to having inexperienced medical staff that was needed at the early months in the pandemic. Now that things are calmer, patients are staying in ICU.

So that also answered a question I had with states reporting ICU beds availability. We know ICU is usually a small unit in a hospital and just reporting on them will make it seem like a hospital is full when near the beginning other parts of hospitals were closed. I thought just counting ICU will give a false sense of hospital status. Now I understand it is better to just count them because you want to assume every patient with C19 will need ICU. Plus you want someone who is very familiar with the equipment in ICU. In the beginning it was so bad. Sorry to say but there were people who pretty much did not know what they were doing but made to feel like a hero. I guess that was understandable then but definitely not now.
____________________________________________
New Evidence Suggests COVID-19 Patients On Ventilators Usually Survive

May 15, 20201:45 PM ET

JON HAMILTON

COVID-19 has given ventilators an undeservedly bad reputation, says Dr. Colin Cooke, an associate professor of medicine in the division of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Michigan.

"It's always disheartening to know that some people are out there saying if you end up on a ventilator it's a death sentence, which is not what we are experiencing — and I don't think it's what the data are showing," Cooke says.

Early reports from China, the United Kingdom and Seattle found mortality rates as high as 90% among patients on ventilators. And more recently, a study of some New York hospitals seemed to show a mortality rate of 88%.

But Cooke and others say the New York figure was misleading because the analysis included only patients who had either died or been discharged. "So folks who were actually in the midst of fighting their illness were not being included in the statistic of patients who were still alive," he says.

Those patients made up more than half of all the people in the study.

And Cooke suspects that many of them will survive.

"We think that mortality for folks that end up on the ventilator with [COVID-19] is going to end up being somewhere between probably 25% up to maybe 50%," Cooke says.

Scary, but hardly a death sentence.

There's also some encouraging news from a New York health system that cares for people with risk factors that make them much more likely to die from COVID-19

Montefiore Health System in the Bronx serves a low-income population with high rates of diabetes, obesity and other health problems. And in April, it faced an onslaught of sick people with COVID-19.

"The number of patients with critical care needs was more than triple the normal levels," says Dr. Michelle Ng Gong, chief of critical care medicine at Montefiore and a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

To cope, regular hospital wards became intensive care units, critical care teams worked extra shifts, and heart doctors found themselves caring for lung patients.

Weeks later, it's still too soon to calculate mortality rates precisely, Gong says. "We still have a large number of patients on mechanical ventilation in our intensive care unit," she says. "So the outcomes of those patients is still uncertain."

But Gong adds that when it comes to COVID-19 patients on ventilators, "We win more than we lose."

That's especially good news coming from a city where hospitals faced so many challenges, says Dr. Todd Rice, who directs the medical intensive care unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.

"They were having to care for patients in makeshift ICUs [with] doctors who weren't their normal ICU doctors," Rice says. "That probably results in some worse outcomes."

So far, Vanderbilt has been able to keep COVID-19 patients on ventilators in existing ICUs with experienced intensive care teams, Rice says. And the mortality rate "is in the mid-to-high 20% range," he says.

That's only a bit higher than the death rate for patients placed on ventilators with severe lung infections unrelated to the coronavirus.

And, like many other intensive care specialists, Rice says he thinks COVID-19 will turn out to be less deadly than the early numbers suggested.

"I think overall these mortality rates are going to be higher than we're used to seeing but not dramatically higher," he says.


Preliminary data from Emory University in Atlanta support that prediction.

The mortality rate among 165 COVID-19 patients placed on a ventilator at Emory was just under 30%. And unlike the New York study, only a few patients were still on a ventilator when the data were collected.

Factors that may have kept death rates low include careful planning and no shortages of equipment or personnel, says Dr. Craig Coopersmith, who directs the critical care center at Emory. But the care largely followed existing protocols for patients with life-threatening lung infections, he says.

"There is no secret magic that can't be replicated in other places," Coopersmith says. "And I do believe that we will see a global trend toward better outcomes on the ventilator and in the intensive care unit."

Also, intensive care doctors say ICU teams are becoming more skilled at treating COVID-19 patients as they gain experience with the disease. For example, they are doing more to prevent dangerous blood clots from forming.

That means COVID-19 mortality rates in ICUs are likely to decrease over time, Coopersmith says.

"It's still going to be a devastating disease," he says, "but a more manageable devastating disease."

 

CurlyNiquee

Well-Known Member
This chart shows the link between restaurant spending and new cases of coronavirus
PUBLISHED FRI, JUN 26 20209:04 AM EDT UPDATED AN HOUR AGO

KEY POINTS
  • JPMorgan analyzed data from 30 million Chase cardholders and Johns Hopkins University’s case tracker and found that higher restaurant spending in a state predicted a rise in new infections there three weeks later.
  • In-person restaurant spending was “particularly predictive.”
  • Conversely, higher spending at supermarkets predicted a slower spread of the virus.


Source: JPMorgan
___________

Higher restaurant spending appears to be linked to a faster spread of the coronavirus, according to a JPMorgan study.

Analyst Jesse Edgerton analyzed data from 30 million Chase credit and debit cardholders and from Johns Hopkins University’s case tracker. He found that increased restaurant spending in a state predicted a rise in new infections there three weeks later.

He also said restaurant spending was the strongest predictor across all categories of card spending.

The United States set a record for the single highest day of new infections on Wednesday. States in the South and West, including California, Texas and Florida, are seeing a surge of new cases and hospitalizations related to the virus.

According to the research note, Louisiana, West Virginia and Arizona showed the smallest relative declines in restaurant spending by Chase cardholders compared with the year-earlier period, while the District of Columbia and Massachusetts saw the sharpest drops.

Edgerton said in-person restaurant spending was “particularly predictive.”

The NPD Group found that transactions for the week ended June 14 were still improving at full-service chain restaurants in Arizona, California and Florida, even as those states reported spikes in new cases. The full-service segment was hardest hit by dining room closures and has taken the longest to recover.


The National Restaurant Association said in a statement that it shares the nation’s concern over rising Covid-19 cases.

“It is irresponsible to pin the rise on a single industry,” the trade group said in a statement to CNBC. “Restaurants have historically operated with highly regulated safety protocols based on the FDA’s Food Code and now have taken new steps to meet social distancing guidelines required by state and federal officials. We all have responsibility for wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing.”

Edgerton also gave the caveat that the states that are now seeing a surge in new infections share other factors outside of higher restaurant spending.

Conversely, higher spending at supermarkets predicts a slower spread of the virus, which could indicate that states that buy more groceries are more mindful of social distancing measures.

“For example, as of three weeks ago, supermarket spending was up 20% or more from last year’s levels in New York and New Jersey, while it was up less than 10% in Texas and Arizona,” Edgerton said.
 

UmSumayyah

Well-Known Member
I wouldn't care if I tested positive.

I was already low-risk and I spent the last three months increasing my health and fitness. I'm healthier now than I was in March
 

NaturalEnigma

Well-Known Member
I have a coworker who is hanging out with friends, going to restaurants, having get togethers at her house, going to graduations without masks! Every time I see her on Facebook she is in a group photo. She has really bad allergies/sinus infections that gives her coughs, trouble breathing and requires antibiotics. She has a really bad cough now and I’m wondering if it’s Corona Virus. She said she went to the doctor for the sinus infection but I’m worried about her. I don’t want to sound like I’m chastising her.
 

SoniT

Well-Known Member
I have a coworker who is hanging out with friends, going to restaurants, having get togethers at her house, going to graduations without masks! Every time I see her on Facebook she is in a group photo. She has really bad allergies/sinus infections that gives her coughs, trouble breathing and requires antibiotics. She has a really bad cough now and I’m wondering if it’s Corona Virus. She said she went to the doctor for the sinus infection but I’m worried about her. I don’t want to sound like I’m chastising her.
My coworker is the same way. She actually got tested recently because she went to a graduation party and took pictures with a girl who has tested positive for coronavirus.
 

Shimmie

"God is the Only Truth -- Period"
Staff member
I have a coworker who is hanging out with friends, going to restaurants, having get togethers at her house, going to graduations without masks! Every time I see her on Facebook she is in a group photo. She has really bad allergies/sinus infections that gives her coughs, trouble breathing and requires antibiotics. She has a really bad cough now and I’m wondering if it’s Corona Virus. She said she went to the doctor for the sinus infection but I’m worried about her. I don’t want to sound like I’m chastising her.
Chastise her. She'll thank you later when it saves her life. Even if she gets defensive, refuses to speak to you, and those things that folks do when prideful, at least it won't be on your conscious should she fall into the consequences of her behaviour.

It's like 'Friends don't let friends breathe Covid..." :pray:
 

UmSumayyah

Well-Known Member
Chastise her. She'll thank you later when it saves her life. Even if she gets defensive, refuses to speak to you, and those things that folks do when prideful, at least it won't be on your conscious should she fall into the consequences of her behaviour.

It's like 'Friends don't let friends breathe Covid..." :pray:
I would get on her case too.
 

C@ssandr@

formerly known as "keyawarren"
So for the states that reopened and now have an increase in cases, were the stats released yet?

I've seen memes laughing about how foolish it was, but there were black employees and business owners there who were being forced off of unemployment and back into the workforce.

I want to see the stats because if those are the people who are infected, then those are the people we are laughing at :/
 

ThirdEyeBeauty

Well-Known Member
So for the states that reopened and now have an increase in cases, were the stats released yet?

I've seen memes laughing about how foolish it was, but there were black employees and business owners there who were being forced off of unemployment and back into the workforce.

I want to see the stats because if those are the people who are infected, then those are the people we are laughing at :/
The stats are interesting and media is confusing.

With Fauci being a health professional, you would think he would give advice, anything, on how we could boost our immune system.
 

dancinstallion

Well-Known Member
So for the states that reopened and now have an increase in cases, were the stats released yet?

I've seen memes laughing about how foolish it was, but there were black employees and business owners there who were being forced off of unemployment and back into the workforce.

I want to see the stats because if those are the people who are infected, then those are the people we are laughing at :/

Chase bank linked most of the increased cases to restaurants reopening/ restaurant spending.



RESTAURANTS
This chart shows the link between restaurant spending and new cases of coronavirus
PUBLISHED FRI, JUN 26 2020 9:04 AM EDT
UPDATED FRI, JUN 26 2020 1:34 PM EDT

Amelia Lucas
SHARE
KEY POINTS

  • JPMorgan analyzed data from 30 million Chase cardholders and Johns Hopkins University's case tracker and found that higher restaurant spending in a state predicted a rise in new infections there three weeks later.
  • In-person restaurant spending was "particularly predictive."
  • Conversely, higher spending at supermarkets predicted a slower spread of the virus.

Source: JPMorgan
Higher restaurant spending appears to be linked to a faster spread of the coronavirus, according to a JPMorgan study.

Analyst Jesse Edgerton analyzed data from 30 million Chase credit and debit cardholders and from Johns Hopkins University's case tracker. He found that increased restaurant spending in a state predicted a rise in new infections there three weeks later.

He also said restaurant spending was the strongest predictor across all categories of card spending.

The United States set a record for the single highest day of new infections on Wednesday. States in the South and West, including California, Texas and Florida, are seeing a surge of new cases and hospitalizations related to the virus.

According to the research note, Louisiana, West Virginia and Arizona showed the smallest relative declines in restaurant spending by Chase cardholders compared with the year-earlier period, while the District of Columbia and Massachusetts saw the sharpest drops.

Edgerton said in-person restaurant spending was "particularly predictive."

The NPD Group found that transactions for the week ended June 14 were still improving at full-service chain restaurants in Arizona, California and Florida, even as those states reported spikes in new cases. The full-service segment was hardest hit by dining room closures and has taken the longest to recover.

The National Restaurant Association said in a statement that it shares the nation's concern over rising Covid-19 cases.

"It is irresponsible to pin the rise on a single industry," the trade group said in a statement to CNBC. "Restaurants have historically operated with highly regulated safety protocols based on the FDA's Food Code and now have taken new steps to meet social distancing guidelines required by state and federal officials. We all have responsibility for wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing."

Edgerton also gave the caveat that the states that are now seeing a surge in new infections share other factors outside of higher restaurant spending.

Conversely, higher spending at supermarkets predicts a slower spread of the virus, which could indicate that states that buy more groceries are more mindful of social distancing measures.

"For example, as of three weeks ago, supermarket spending was up 20% or more from last year's levels in New York and New Jersey, while it was up less than 10% in Texas and Arizona," Edgerton said.
 

ThirdEyeBeauty

Well-Known Member
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
05.28.03 1:09 PM
SCIENCE
Feds Race to Make SARS Vaccine
Developing a vaccine often takes a couple of decades or longer, but the federal government is aiming to develop a SARS vaccine in just three years. Scientists at the Vaccine Research Center are attacking the problem on several fronts, although some question whether a SARS vaccine is even possible.
Fifteen or 20 years to create a new vaccine is considered quite speedy. So the federal government's blueprint for a shot to stop the SARS epidemic in a mere three years seems positively head-snapping.

Can it be done?

Certainly, says Dr. Gary Nabel, chief of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "If everything went perfectly," he qualifies. "If all the stars were aligned."

The stars almost never align precisely in medical research. But if they do, Nabel says scientists will finish all the basic lab work, creating the vaccine and testing it in animals, in just one year.

Then they will spend two more trying it out on people to make sure it works, turn the results over to the Food and Drug Administration and be done.

No vaccine in modern times has gone from start to finish nearly that fast. But even if Nabel's time line proves unrealistic, his willingness to state it out loud shows how seriously the government takes SARS.

The strategy for changing the pace from glacial to galactic: Forget solving problems one at a time.

At Nabel's institute, two teams are working separately to create possible vaccines. One sticks to the time-tested approach of making them with dead or weakened viruses. The other builds them with up-to-the-second gene-splicing tools.

Instead of dealing with big technical issues in the usual one-by-one order, scientists will jump into all of them at once. For instance, they are gearing up production of newly minted vaccines at the same time they figure out how to test them in animals and tease apart exactly how the human immune system does the job of fighting off SARS on its own.

"Parallel tracking," Nabel calls this. It's also called science in a hurry.

Why the rush? Why work so hard to defend against a disease that is just a few months old, that has yet to kill a single person in the United States?

No one knows how bad SARS will become, whether it will burn out or continue to spread, even exactly how it makes people so sick. But the consensus among the country's top health officials is that it would be foolish to wait and see.

Even if SARS is somehow contained in China and Taiwan, many experts doubt it will ever be wiped from the planet, even though this is the World Health Organization's goal. More likely, they say, the virus will come and go, perhaps in some seasonal pattern, maybe by chance.

No matter what happens in the next few months, federal officials promise to keep working on a vaccine so the world will be ready whenever, wherever SARS returns.

"We need a vaccine. There's no question about it," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the infectious disease institute. "This is potentially disastrous enough that we can't just hope it will go away and stay away."

The government is not alone in this. It is encouraging private vaccine makers to take a crack at SARS. In April, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson hosted a meeting of vaccine scientists, where government researchers shared what they knew about the virus and promised them samples to work with.

"They more or less said, 'We want your entrepreneurial brains working on this,"' says Una Ryan, president of Avant Immunotherapeutics.

Labs from Hong Kong to Canada are also tackling SARS vaccines, and Fauci said his institute will sign contracts with up to a dozen companies to help with development.

At this point, however, the single biggest question is still unanswered: Is a SARS vaccine even possible?

Dr. Emilio Emini, head of vaccine development at Merck, is among those trying to answer this. For now he refuses even to chance a guess.

"This is a new virus. So much is not understood," he says. "It's a big black box."

Still, Nabel says he knows of at least three major pharmaceutical companies besides Merck, the world's largest vaccine maker, that have gone to work on SARS, even though no one can be sure whether there will ever be a market for a vaccine.

Their success will depend on figuring out a way to train the body's immune system to see the SARS virus quickly, to recognize it as dangerous and to kill it before it makes people sick.

Even as well as this approach has subdued some of the world's most persistent infections, there are many notable exceptions. Malaria and tuberculosis, for instance, have resisted decades of vaccine research. And of course scientists cannot forget their humbling failure at a vaccine for HIV, the most studied virus in history.

Nevertheless, one strong clue at least gives them some hope: Most people who catch the SARS virus eventually fight it off and get better.

"That means their immune response is working, and that means a vaccine is possible," says Dr. Louis Picker, associate director of Oregon Health & Science University's Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute. "It's just a matter of finding the approach that will mimic that response without being too dangerous."

Worry that a vaccine will be too dangerous is one reason development takes so long. No one wants to make healthy people sick by giving them shots intended to prevent illness. So typically vaccines are tested painstakingly on thousands of volunteers over many years to prove they do far more good than harm.

Even with this, dangers may come to light only when they get into routine use. Four years ago, the first rotavirus vaccine was pulled from the market after just one year. The shots prevent childhood diarrhea, but they also turned out to cause life-threatening bowel obstructions in one in 10,000 recipients.

Scientists are especially cautious because of their experience with vaccines aimed at animal relatives of the SARS virus. SARS is a coronavirus, the same virus family that causes serious diseases in pigs and other animals. While shots work well against some of these, they occasionally go disastrously bad. A vaccine for the feline coronavirus actually results in worse disease, not less, when cats catch the virus.

Vaccines work by giving the body a glimpse of its target, typically a dead virus, a weakened live one or bits of viral proteins. When all goes well, the immune system remembers these and goes on full attack when it later encounters the real thing.

But as happened with the cat vaccine, they sometimes trigger an off-kilter immune reaction, so when attacked by the actual virus, the system responds with a weak or misguided defense.

Vaccines made from killed viruses can have this paradoxical result. And even if they do no harm, the killed virus vaccines often fail to rally a meaningful counter-assault. Nevertheless, the approach works against some microbes, including the flu, and the infectious disease institute's Dr. Brian Murphy is developing a SARS vaccine with virus killed with formaldehyde.

When that is finished, Murphy will probably turn to another approach that has produced most of the world's vaccines, an attenuated virus. These are made by growing the virus over and over until it builds up enough mutations to leave it too weak to do harm.

Because the attenuated viruses cause true infections, they trigger an especially robust and well-rounded defense, arming the immune system to launch both antibodies and virus-killing T cells. But there are drawbacks: They can take a long time to make, and the crippled virus can theoretically mutate to regain its power, making people sick.

"They are effective but dangerous, and it will take a long time to get one we would give to people," says Picker.

Vaccines based on genetic engineering may be faster.

One approach is using gene-splicing to make plenty of SARS virus parts, such as the protein prongs that stick out from the virus, giving it a crown-like appearance under a microscope. Injecting these proteins -- but not the virus itself -- may be enough to prompt the immune system to recognize the SARS virus.

A vaccine made this way works well against hepatitis B. But like killed viruses, the bare proteins can also trigger wimpy or aberrant immune responses.

Nabel's own lab is taking another gene-based approach -- harmless viruses hollowed out to carry SARS genes into the body. Many such delivery vehicles are possible, but Nabel uses a weakened adenovirus, a bug that ordinarily causes colds, that is fitted out with SARS DNA.

Inside the body, these genes should produce authentic-looking SARS proteins, and researchers hope they stimulate a knockout strike against the SARS virus with the full repertoire of immune system weapons.

Even if one of these approaches quickly shows promise, it still must be pushed through human testing in a part of the world where SARS is spreading or, if SARS disappears, go through extensive animal testing. Some doubt all this can be accomplished quickly.

"Could the rules get changed so it would take less than 15 years? Yes. But could it be three years?" asks Dr. Donna Ambrosino, head of Massachusetts Biologic Laboratory, a nonprofit vaccine maker.

Doubtful, she says. There are simply too many unknowns, both about the virus itself and the safety of any strategy to stop it. She notes that scientists have been trying since the 1960s to make a vaccine for another breathing infection, the respiratory syncytial virus, which causes serious disease in babies.

"We know the proteins. We know the antibodies. We have animal models. We know all of that," she says. "But we still don't have a vaccine that works."
 
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