High Host Mortality Rate Quantitatively Related to High Virus Replikin Count

In a presentation at the World Aquaculture Conference in San Antonio, Texas, Replikins Ltd. reported that the concentration of replikin genome elements in five different viruses - human H5N1 influenza and shrimp 4 strains of Taura virus - is quantitatively related to percent mortality in two different hosts, humans and shrimp respectively. Streaming video of the presentation is available at http://scitalks.com/index.php?category=search&search=bogoch.

San Antonio, Texas (PRWEB) March 6, 2007 -- A major challenge in virus epidemiology and prevention is the difficulty of identifying which gene fragments contained in different virus strains are likely to pose a serious health risk, both in animals and humans.

In a presentation at the World Aquaculture Conference, held at the San Antonio Convention Center, Dr. Samuel Bogoch, Chairman of Replikins, reported results of recent studies which show that the higher the Replikin Count of the virus, the higher the mortality rates of the host. Replikin counts were defined as the number of replikin peptide sequences per 100 amino acids in th genome of the virus under study.

In the animal portion of the presentation, Dr. Bogoch reported early results of an ongoing research collaboration aimed at identifying the lethality of different sub-strains of the shrimp Taura virus. In the human portion, higher Replikin counts were associated with higher death rates in current strains of the H5N1 Bird Flu virus.

This is the first instance of virus protein structure shown to be quantitatively related not only to the occurrence of epidemics but now specifically to mortality rate of the host. Streaming video of the presentation is available at Scitalks, the video website for science talks and presentations: http://www.scitalks.com/index.php?category=search&search=bogoch

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virus flu bird flu h5n1 shrimp virus taura virus replikins vaccine research bioinformatics

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