VPg

[Ian A. York]

In article <najital-2505951920410001 at barnes_mac6.rockefeller.edu> najital at rockvax.rockefeller.edu (Lyle Najita) writes:

>worth funding. Given that every time I talked to people about my thesis
>work the response was, "Oh, I thought they cured polio years ago.", I
>doubt that the same level of funding will be available in the future.

That brings up a point that should be made.  Many of the diseases that 
are comonly believed (in the first world) to be trivial or cured are 
still epidemic.  Perhaps you can help me put together a short list of 
some of these.  Examples include rabies, which kills tens of thousands of 
people a year (last definitive figure I saw was 25,000 in 1985, which was 
probably an underestimate due to incomplete reporting) and measles, which 
kills about 1,000,000 people a year, I believe.  Off the virology topic, 
I saw WHO estimates that 30 million people would die of tuberculosis in 
the next decade, and I believe that there are around 2.4 million people 
with leprosy.  For comparison, Ebola has killed some 300 people in the 
past 25 years.  

Everyone in the virology group - feel free to e-mail me with some 
statistics on your pet virus. I'll try to put together a list and post it 
here at some point.

Ian
 
-- 
Ian York   (york at mbcrr.harvard.edu)
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 44 Binney St., Boston MA 02115
Phone (617)-632-3921     Fax  (617)-632-2627