Gators and Neuraminidase

Tonight's been a documentary night. From the Florida everglades and alligator attacks on humans to the zoonoses of Hong Kong. So let's start with the gators.

Gators

An attack on an islet dwelling Florida resident by a 15 foot alligator sparked off a whole bunch of legislative action against the prehistoric reptilians. Any alligator longer than 4 feet within a certain perimeter of inhabited islands is killed by legal hunting teams. Like a 3 foot fence wouldn't be enough. During the doc, the phrases man-killer, human hunter, and the like were used liberally.
Is it so bizarre to people that creatures that are:

1. carnivorous
2. decked out in millions of years of evolutionary hunting gear and
3 .which take advantage of the stupidity of housing developers

would attack us soft and easily crunched primates? NatGeo has let me down through its latter day sensationalistic backwash. If I wanted that I'd just watch the news. Anyway, the fatal blow to the attacked woman wasn't the bite, but the microorganisms living in the gator's mouth which were practically injected into her bloodstream. Oral hygiene in the reptile has been sacrificed for nutrition - large chunks of meat which are hard for their dental arrangement to handle are allowed to rot inside their mouth until they're soft enough to swallow. A great excuse to fill your cheeks up with food and then amble about breathing heavily at dinner parties . It may also come in handy when attempting to masticate some of the cafeteria food at uni. A materials engineer should take a look at that stuff, spaceflight will never be the same again. On to...


Superflu

Bad news on this front I'm afraid, and not just because of NatGeo's rather tabloid-like presentation of the not so well phrased information. Pharmaceutical companies aren't stockpiling unless someone pays for it and, of course, no one's paying for it. The antiviral that is our best bet to contain the virus doesn't actually stop it infecting, but locks it inside the cells it's already hijacked. If you have no idea what I'm on about and would like to, check out PubMed which I've linked to in the Links section of this site. Searching their free online textbooks should clarify things. The creation of the virus is likely to happen inside border species like pigs, since they can harbour both human and avian (bird) strains of flu. In that environment, the flu viruses can merge genomes and the new 'superflu' (another despairingly panic inducing sensationalism coined by sensationalist panic mongers the world over) is forged. It's natural enough that this would eventually happen, the unnatural part is that it's been made so easy. To me, the whole factory farming trend is creating a good chunk of the problem. Keeping that many animals packed in such deplorable conditions is not just cruel, but provides the perfect conditions for viruses and similar pathogens to mutate and spread very fast. But then, who worries where the meat you get in the supermarket comes from right ?

The Meatrix

Long live free range!

Sources
Gator:http://www.pbs.org/kratts/world/na/alligator/images/alligator.jpg