It’s flu, but not as we know it

April 26, 2009 - 1:52 PM by · 4 Comments
Filed under: Environment, General, Life, Medical Breakthroughs 

Well, a few years ago, it looked like avian flu was going to be the great pandemic that would lay waste to the world’s population. Experts debated it, newspapers wrote billions of words on it, and a whole generation of children stopped picking up feathers. As the pandemic failed to materialize, however, gradually the fear subsided.

Is that pig safe?

Is that pig safe?

Now a new flu has suddenly emerged, and it’s spreading fast. There have already been some 80 deaths in Mexico from swine flu, and cases in the US and New Zealand. Now there’s a suspected case in Israel, of an Israeli who has just returned from Mexico.

With the World Health Organization declaring the disease a “public health event of international concern”, with “pandemic potential”, flu is once more the hot disaster story of the season, making rather a nice change from Iran.

Anti-viral drug Tamiflu is being touted as an answer, but Israel also has a possible alternative – Sambucol. This herbal extract has been on the market for years, selling well in the US and in over 17 countries around the world as a remedy for flu.

The herbal remedy, made from elderberry, was developed by Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu, a world-renowned Israeli virologist, and is said to cut the duration and severity of flu by up to half.
In 2006, a British medical research institute ran cell culture tests (clinical trials were off the agenda for obvious reasons), and announced that it was 99% effective against the avian flu virus, H5N1.

A year earlier, another study showed that the remedy was not just effective against human and avian flu, but also swine flu as well. Of course at that time no one really cared about flu from pigs.

I interviewed Mumcuoglu after the 2006 tests, and she told me then that it didn’t really matter where the flu originated. “Our research has shown that the antiviral effect of Sambucol is not strain-specific. It was effective against all influenza viruses tested,” she said.

“If you stop the flu virus at the beginning then you stop it going to the lungs, or from creating the additional complications that are normally the cause of death,” she added.

Now we have still to see what actually happens with swine flu. Newspapers love to scare the public, and the public apparently loves to be scared.

In Mexico, the government is recommending that people stop going to public places, kissing friends, or shaking friends with colleagues. Though I’m clearly no expert, if swine flu one day reaches your community, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to also try taking Sambucol as well – just in case.

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Googling for Flu

November 13, 2008 - 1:12 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: General 

Fewer Americans may get the flu this year – thanks to technology developed in Israel. Notice I didn’t say “medicine” or “vaccine,” but technology – in the form of Google Flu Trends (http://www.google.org/flutrends/), developed at the Google research and development center in Tel Aviv.

Google Trends lets you see how often a search term is entered into the Google “omnibox” across various regions of the world, and in various languages. The idea behind Flu Trends is to give people in specific regions a heads up on whether their area is set to be invaded by flu bugs. An uptick in searches for flu-related information, like symptoms and medications, would indicate that the disease is beginning to take hold in a particular area, according to Google’s blog (http://tinyurl.com/5lxh9v).

flue-shot-trends1111.jpg“Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness,” the blog says.

While most people don’t even realize that Google has a presence in Israel, the fact is the company has two development centers here – one of the few countries in the world to be graced with such an honor, and an indication of how highly Google values Israeli researchers and engineers. Yoelle Mark, heado of Google’s Haifa R&D center (the other one is in Tel Aviv), who spoke at a recent Google conference here. Trends was largely developed in Haifa.

But it turns out that Google has been not only using made in Israel tech – its whole identity could be considered to have been created here, according to this article in Haaretz. Artist Ruth Kedar designed the famous Google logo ten years ago while she was at Stanford in California. According to Kedar, the logo’s simple look is deceptive, hiding its complex layers. “Someone who sees the logo for the first time doesn’t necessarily need to absorb all the layers and considerations behind every decision – it’s better for him to discover something new every time,” the article quotes here as saying.

“It somewhat amuses me to turn on the computer and look at the logo I designed. But it also fills me with pride,” she said. “When you say Google to people today, they immediately see the colorful logo.”

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