I would like to draw attention to a recent blog post by Professor Raina MacIntyre of the University of New South Wales (with whom I have occasionally collaborated). MacIntyre points out the complexity of any attempt to eliminate measles completely partly because of how infectious it is: elementary herd immunity calculations show that the required minimum …
Worldwide Measles Outbreaks 2019
In response to the surge of measles outbreaks in the U.S. this year, Lauren Gardner, who is in the process of moving to Johns Hopkins from the University of New South Wales, and I are doing a risk analysis that combines the geography of hotspots of vaccine avoidance (from Olive et al. 2018) with international …
Waiting for a Measles Epidemic
CNN has a comment from Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the recent measles outbreaks in Washington and Oregon. This was a predicted disaster waiting to happen, given that these two states are in the top five nationally for the percentage of children who have nonmedical exemptions from compulsory vaccinations. Last year Peter Hotez and several collaborators …
Op-Ed on Gene Editing
I wrote the following op-ed based on the earlier blog post; it appeared in The Hill today and has generated 82 comments as of now: How we proceed with human gene editing will be the debate of the future .
What a Little Gene Editing Can Do for You
Stuart Newman, with whom I am working on a book (with Lenny Moss as the third author), drew my attention to this article from the Wall Street Journal by Preetika Rana and Lucy Kramer. It is an important article responding to the recent reports of successful germ-line editing from China (primarily the work of Dr. He …
Continue reading "What a Little Gene Editing Can Do for You"
Sahotra Sarkar 