Viruses

As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

It looked like an open-and-shut case. More than half the genes in the H1N1 virus behind the current flu outbreaks were traced to pigs. The first person known to be sickened with swine flu in Mexico, the outbreak's epicenter, lived near an industrial farm that produces almost a million hogs a year. The virus was quickly dubbed "swine flu." Officials in Egypt ordered destruction of all 300,000 of the country's pigs. Afghanistan's one known pig was quarantined.

Two studies published Thursday in the journals Science and Diabetologia provide evidence that common viruses may cause childhood diabetes, paving the way for potential vaccines, researchers said. One team showed that enteroviruses, which cause colds, were found frequently in pancreases of youths who had recently died from Type 1 diabetes, but not in healthy samples. This suggests a virus could trigger the disease in children genetically predisposed to the condition, said Alan Foulis of the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland, who worked on one of the studies.

A deadly fish virus has been found for the first time in southern Lake Michigan and an Ohio reservoir, spurring fears of major fish kills and the virus' possible migration to the Mississippi River. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources invoked emergency fishing regulations June 30 to stop the spread of viral hemorrhagic septicemia, or VHS, often described as "fish Ebola," which was found in round gobies and rock bass tested at a marina near the Wisconsin border in early June.

San Quentin State Prison was closed indefinitely to new inmates and visitors Wednesday as officials fought to contain a raging gastroenteritis outbreak among roughly 500 convicts and staff members. The virus, which was first detected Dec. 28, has spread to all of the Marin County prison's housing units except a relatively isolated one with 15 inmates. On death row, about one-fourth of the prison's 620 condemned men have become sick, officials said.

Bird flu viruses are unlikely to survive sewerage and drinking water treatment systems, making it doubtful contaminated feces could infect plant workers and spread through tap water, scientists at Cornell University said. The researchers studied a low-pathogenic H5N2 avian influenza virus, which they said resembled the lethal H5N1 strain circulating in Asia and Africa.

The flu may be getting a late start this year, but we haven't escaped virus-induced misery. Noroviruses, which cause gastrointestinal illness, appear to be more widespread and severe than usual this winter, federal health officials say. For those who've succumbed, no explanation is necessary. Those who haven't are lucky. Noroviruses -- actually a group of about 40 strains of virus -- cause intense vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, headache and fever.

Mad cow disease and other related brain disorders may be caused by a virus and not the weird, misshapen proteins, known as prions, that scientists think are responsible, according to a study released Monday. Researchers reported that they found virus-like particles in mouse nerve cells infected with two brain-wasting diseases similar to mad cow disease, but found no traces of the particles in uninfected cells. Lead author Dr.

Infections by a recently discovered virus may be responsible for a significant fraction of stillbirths, Swedish and American researchers reported Thursday in the journal Birth Defects Research. The Ljungan virus is named after the Swedish river valley where virologist Bo Niklasson of Uppsala University discovered it in voles in 1999. The virus is apparently also common in American rodents, said his coauthor, geneticist William Klitz of the Public Health Institute in Oakland.

One of the most widely used animal models for Type 1 diabetes has been found to carry a virus that was previously shown to produce diabetes in other rodents, a finding that offers the possibility of new treatments for the widespread disorder. The BioBreeding, or BB, rat naturally develops diabetes at about 2 months of age, and researchers have attributed the disease to genetics.