Virology and Infectious Diseases A Happy Collision of Interests
by Ed Rybicki
(Posted January 9, 1998 · Issue 23; archived January 30, 1998)
Despite being a plant virologist, and quite sensibly working with organisms that can't infect me, I have long been morbidly interested in the messy side of virology. The hemorrhagic fevers, the mystery illnesses leaping out of the jungle, the different varieties of sudden death stalking the explorer and even the tourist have fascinated me since I first heard of magical names like Marburg, Machupo, and Ebola.
I started to flesh out the University of Cape Town's first Department of Microbiology home page in late 1993. I found time to indulge my "messy virus" fascination putting up the essay "Emerging and Re-Emerging Viruses" by Alison Jacobson. This article was written in response to many Internet requests for Ebola information following the 1994 publication of the sensationalist book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. I also posted an essay on hantaviruses by Brian Hjelle when a sudden upsurge of public Web interest in hantaviruses had been spurred by the outbreak in the American Southwest.
Nothing could have prepared us for the avalanche of interest in our Web site, and in virology resources in general, that was sparked by the news of the Kikwit Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in May 1995. I updated our site on a twice daily basis for the duration of the epidemic. Subsequently, I developed and extended our Ebola page by adding more background information. As new outbreaks occurred I detailed them: Ebola in Gabon in mid-1996, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in the Oudtshoorn area of South Africa in late 1996.
Those disease episodes prompted two important online developments. Thanks to the Internet, the general public had unprecedented access to public health information previously limited largely to health care professionals. In addition, the Web could be a particularly effective means of early warning about epidemics.
During this time, it became obvious to me that fast-breaking stories on epidemics were an excellent means of educating students and the lay public about viruses and the practice of virology. I became more and more interested in using the Web as a medium for teaching. The real value of using a "hot virus" Web site as a curriculum tool is that it brings home the realities of an infectious-disease outbreak better than any textbook possibly could.
One can only go so far in the use of electronic "hot" virology for teaching purposes. One still has to provide the basics, some framework on which to hang the supplemental material. Accordingly, I have been developing the Electronic Introduction to Molecular Virology since 1994 as a stand-alone online tutorial. Complementary material is provided by Alan Cann's virology course lecture notes from the University of Leicester, which supply detail for individual viral taxons and descriptions of the immune system. Thus, my students now have access to an entire semester's worth of lecture notes and other material on the Web, with all the advantages of effectively free access, full color, and lately animations, too.
So what resources are available on the Web for "hot" virology? The best general-purpose site is the Outbreak site - the outgrowth of David Ornstein's fascination with Ebola - that covers everything from recent problems with Lassa fever in Sierra Leone to the current bird-to-human influenza incidents in Hong Kong. Outbreak provides detailed coverage of 12 infectious diseases and current information on active and past outbreaks. Material at Outbreak is not limited to viruses, giving a more holistic view of infectious disease.
Another extremely useful resource is ProMED (Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases). The ProMED provides current information on emerging diseases as a digest of daily e-mail posts. ProMED covers all infectious diseases, of animals as well as plants. In addition, the ProMED digests are searchably archived at the Medscape and Satelife Web sites. Just recently it has been particularly fascinating to follow the ongoing incidences of monkeypox infection in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).
Other major Web sites for information on hot viruses are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization sites. The information to be gleaned from here is definitely authoritative, if not particularly current, and more than a little dry (as befits official releases). However, both CDC and WHO issue regular updates during severe disease outbreaks, such as the 1995 Kikwit Ebola epidemic and the different outbreaks of Ebola in Gabon. This information can be the only definitive news to emerge in real time, especially if the outbreak is somewhere particularly rural or Third World.
The WHO Web site contains an outbreaks section that summarizes recent infectious disease activities and the WHO also publishes a Weekly Epidemiological Record that is available via e-mail or as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. The CDC and the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID) publish an very useful journal entitled Emerging Infectious Diseases. This journal is a valuable source of authoritative research data on emerging viruses and is available electronically in HTML or PDF.
Sources of "hard" virology news are few and far between. However, a regular scan of the Web using one of the many available search engines can turn up the odd useful snippet. So can a regular scan of the better online newspapers, such as the Electronic Telegraph (United Kingdom), the Nando Times (United States) and the Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), or the World News section of the CNN Web site.
For general virology information, All the Virology on the WWW, developed by David Sander at Tulane University, is a tremendous site that provides a comprehensive library of virology Web pages and other relevant resources. The site includes links to the latest virology and microbial news, virology research labs, online virology courses, and a useful section on emerging viruses. All the Virology on the WWW also features the extensive Big Picture Book of Viruses, which contains over 100 images.
Several interesting Web sites present collections of articles, lectures and other virus information. The Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has a nicely organized collection of information. A particularly useful part of this site is the Electron Micrograph Library of images, which includes the immuno-gold labeling protocol. The Emerging Infections Information Network (EIINet) at the Yale University School of Medicine presents a yearly lecture series. Lecture transcripts, movies, and slides from twenty lectures from 1996 and 1997 are available at the EIINet site. In addition, the Virology Down Under Web site provides detailed profiles of many viruses and includes general information on hematology and viral diagnostics.
For current research data on viruses, NCBI's PubMed database provides the most up-to-date references for both published and pre-published material. Research information can sometimes be obtained from the BIOSCIbionet.virology newsgroup.
The Web offers access to everything from official institutional reports to research articles to popular press news releases about "hot" viruses. These resources can convey the realities of an infectious-disease outbreak and provide intriguing pictures of epidemiologists and virologists at work. This information also provides insight into the very real and tragic human drama as people continue to die, despite the heroic efforts of health care personnel.
Ed Rybicki is Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Cape Town.
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I started to flesh out the University of Cape Town's first Department of Microbiology home page in late 1993. I found time to indulge my "messy virus" fascination putting up the essay "Emerging and Re-Emerging Viruses" by Alison Jacobson. This article was written in response to many Internet requests for Ebola information following the 1994 publication of the sensationalist book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. I also posted an essay on hantaviruses by Brian Hjelle when a sudden upsurge of public Web interest in hantaviruses had been spurred by the outbreak in the American Southwest. 
We were not alone or even the first. The 
During this time, it became obvious to me that fast-breaking stories on epidemics were an excellent means of educating students and the lay public about viruses and the practice of virology. I became more and more interested in using the Web as a medium for teaching. The real value of using a "hot virus" Web site as a curriculum tool is that it brings home the realities of an infectious-disease outbreak better than any textbook possibly could.
So what resources are available on the Web for "hot" virology? The best general-purpose site is the 
Other major Web sites for information on hot viruses are the 
Sources of "hard" virology news are few and far between. However, a regular scan of the Web using one of the many available search engines can turn up the odd useful snippet. So can a regular scan of the better online newspapers, such as the 
Several interesting Web sites present collections of articles, lectures and other virus information. The 
