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9 Dec, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Lyssavirus infection confirmed in Far North Queensland as bat-related injuries rise
abc.net.au/news/2020-12-0…
"While ABLV is more likely to be found in a sick or injured bat, bats that appear healthy may also be infectious."
conditions.health.qld.gov.au/HealthConditio….
"In Australia, evidence of ABLV infection has been found in species of flying foxes/fruit bats and insect-eating microbats. It is assumed that any bat in Australia could potentially carry ABLV"
health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/fac…
"There is no evidence that lyssaviruses in bats can establish and spread among terrestrial animals, although isolated cases in humans may occur on rare occasions."
www2.health.vic.gov.au/public-health/….
But we have a world expert among us who can comment much more authoritatively if needed... @HumeField

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More from @MackayIM

ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 Profile picture
9 Dec
That website opinion attack piece on the Corman/Drosten RT-rPCR tests has a few confused & sometimes very wrong comments.
I'll preface this thread with a *presumption* I'm making - these authors haven't worked on or with this test themselves. And that matters a lot if true.
I'm not going through everything but here's one from their "Top10 things I hate about this test" list.
From Number 5. "nor does it contain any other negative controls"
But Corman et al. are actually very clear that negative controls were included.
"all assays were tested 120 times in parallel with water and no other nucleic acid except the provided oligonucleotides. In none of these reactions was any positive signal detected"

But even better, they tested primer specificity on a lot of human viruses, including CoVs: Image
Read 26 tweets
ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 Profile picture
7 Dec
Hey all, if you want a mug like this; a guide.
Check my pinned tweet thread. Near the bottom is a link to my @figshare page where there's an editable .svg (Other images there as well).
I use @inkscape to make & edit .svg files.
Install the font I used (Repirse Script) *first*,
or use your own.
Edit the image to remove the text in the bottom right. Or keep it. Also think about squashing the image a little vertically tighter so it stretches further around mug, horizontally.
Export in a relavent image format (I save as .png format for here & my blog)
Next, find your local mug-making site. I used @Vistaprint but closer to home means faster delivery. Pick a mug colour (find another site if you can't get mug colours!). Place your image as a wraparound using the site's tool. Pay.
Read 4 tweets
ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 Profile picture
7 Dec
Recently asked to comment for an end of year 'what we've learned since January' story.
There is no way to do this justice in a few quotes or a short story.
We've learned so much about so many things.
Like the virus, disease, inequities, inequalities, the chaos sown by
misinformation, the driving desire of some to want things to blame & punish, the role of science in leadership, the need for public health institutions to have a greater role in education & authentic communication,
the importance of speed & flexibility in labs, that scientists can also be biased or mean or idiots (=group of humans), from lab test processes aren't widely understood (most of the time no one cares though),
Read 6 tweets
ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 Profile picture
28 Nov
COVID-19 testing and correlation with infectious virus, cycle thresholds, and analytical sensitivity cebm.net/study/covid-19… via @cebmoxford
Upfront-how one interprets late PCR results DOES MATTER. No argument. I am very much aware that late Cts mean less RNA (and by extrapolation based on history and experience, less virus) is typically present.
How does that relate to "false positives" & PCR cycle numbers?
A false-positive PCR result typically means that the PCR was positive when no virus had ever been present.
This is different from an infected person's sample not having any *infectious* virus, yet still returning a PCR-positive because of "dead virus"/RNA fragments being shed.
Read 14 tweets
ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 Profile picture
28 Nov
The BMJ 'bolide as origin of COVID-19' is a joke piece though. Right?
"we have developed the unorthodox proposal that the Covid-19 virus, like many other pandemic viruses, may have an extraterrestrial origin and was initially dispersed in the high atmosphere from a disintegrating cometary bolide"
bmj.com/content/371/bm…
"In our model of the pandemic we argue that trillions of virions entered the Earth’s upper atmosphere sometime in the latter part of 2019. Virus-laden dust clouds were thereafter able to break through to ground level locations,
Read 4 tweets
ɪᴀɴ ᴍ. ᴍᴀᴄᴋᴀʏ, ᴘʜᴅ 🦠🤧🧬🥼🦟🧻 Profile picture
25 Nov
In the spirit of filling those with no PCR experience in. This is a lunchtime thread showing the progress of a reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-rPCR) "run".
The thing being amplified-the target or template-is a tiny amount of RNA I'd previously made
...in the lab ("in vitro transcribed RNA").
At this point there's too small an amount of RNA to view or use to get specific virus info from, so we put it through some chemistry & cycling temperature changes (the RT-PCR process) to copy it to levels we can "see".
RT-PCR isn't the only way to do this but its the topic here
So after the ivtRNA is added to a tiny tube (0.2ml) with enzyme, buffer, water, 2 primers and a probe, it's incubated at 50'C for a few minutes for RT enzyme to copy the RNA into complementary DNA (cDNA).
No signal yet
Read 24 tweets

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