Can You Get the Flu From Touching a Sneezy Handle?

You’re far more likely to get the flu from breathing in the virus when you’re around someone who has it than you are from touching infected items around your house, say researchers from Great Britain.

Most household materials can’t sustain enough influenza—the virus which causes the common disease we call “the flu”—to infect another person by physical contact after only a few hours. These results confirmed what most scientists suspected: the influenza virus is quite fragile.

To test the survival of the virus on household items, researchers deposited small amounts of influenza on items like light switches, toys, kitchen counters, keyboards, and window glass in a laboratory setting. Then they measured the amount of viable virus (meaning a large enough quantity to lead to an infection) at set times.

On all surfaces tested, there was no longer any viable virus after nine hours. In fact, most surfaces could be considered “contamination free” in four hours or less. Hard, non-porous materials such as stainless steel allowed for longer survival times while softer, porous materials like wood allowed for the shortest.

According to Jane Greatorex, lead scientist on the research team and senior research scientist for the Health Protection Agency at the University of Cambridge, the biggest surprise in these results was the relatively long survival times observed on stainless steel, a common material in hospitals, compared to other materials.

On “stainless steel, the virus survives a little bit longer, which perhaps isn’t so good in a hospital setting,” she says. “Stainless steel is often used on things like bedrails and sinks and door handles—that might not be ideal.”

Epidemiologist Rene Najera of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Division at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene says the awareness of virus survival time on stainless steel could lead to improved interventions in hospital cleanliness guidelines, a key component to pandemic response planning.

“Where you see these places that are spotless but they’re all covered in stainless steel—they’re easier to clean but unfortunately, as we saw in the study, the flu virus liked it a lot,” says Najera. “So you would recommend, if you’ve got stainless steel, clean it often and clean it well during flu season.”

Jonathan Van-Tam, professor of health protection at the University of Nottingham and co-author of the study, thinks even the stainless steel results should come as a reassurance to people. “If you think about an office, where people go home at six p.m. in the evening, by the time people come back in at eight a.m. in the morning, people shouldn’t be fretting too much about viruses left over from yesterday,” says Van-Tam. Normal surfaces probably don’t have to be intensely sanitized “because it’s unlikely there will be any virus left.”

Another important aspect, notes Van-Tam, is that there are many critical factors that must line up for contact transmission to occur. After enough of the virus has been applied to a surface by coughing, sneezing, or snotty hands, the virus needs to survive long enough to pass on to somebody else. Then it has to survive on the person’s hands and be rubbed against a mucus membrane on the patient’s face, like the eyes, nose, or mouth. If enough virus is still alive at that point, it still has to have a high enough concentration to be infectious.

These results clear up some uncertainty about the transmission methods of influenza and have already brought about changes in public health policy in Great Britain. The team fed their results immediately to Great Britain’s Department of Health, says Greatorex. This resulted in a change to the national advertising program used for spreading the word about influenza control.

“We were able to confirm that we were getting out the correct messages—that you’re most likely to catch this virus by being sneezed on or being in close proximity to sick people,” says Greatorex. “The virus doesn’t really survive that well on household surfaces.”

This study and others like it are aimed at understanding the influenza virus as part of a larger effort to prevent the next big flu pandemic—or worldwide flu outbreak—like the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic which killed more than 18,000 people worldwide.

Paul Digard, co-author of the study and senior lecturer in the department of pathology at the University of Cambridge, says one of the two strains of influenza the research team used was isolated from that same pandemic, “which is about as close as you can get to the real thing,” says Digard.

“People have been planning like mad for the next flu pandemic since 2004 or 2005,” says Van-Tam.

Urgency to improve the country’s pandemic response heightened with the outbreak of bird flu in India in 2006 and resulted in a 2007 report from Great Britain’s Department of Health that targeted several knowledge gaps in influenza research. “One of the things they identified is they didn’t really know how long the virus survived on surfaces in general,” says Greatorex.

There are three ways to get the flu, says Van-Tam. Contact transmission (either directly touching an infected person and passing secretions or touching an infected surface where that person has deposited flu virus) is one of them. The other methods include aerosols (small solid or liquid particles suspended in air that travel long distances) and large droplets (generated by coughing or sneezing) that travel short distances. “And out of that comes one question: how long do human flu viruses actually survive?” says Van-Tam.

When it comes to pandemic planning, everybody seems to be interested in that one. “You get teachers or education department policy makers asking: how long will the flu virus last on a classroom table?” says Van-Tam. “I’ve even had customs and excise officials saying, at the airports: if we’re receiving freight from another country in a pandemic, is there a risk at touching the outside of freight containers? How long does the virus survive?”

In dealing with flu pandemics, planners can never be too vigilant. In 1918, an influenza pandemic (called the “Spanish” flu) killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide (about three percent of the world’s population at the time) in one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.

Researchers continue to strive for a better understanding of the continuously-evolving influenza virus. According to Elena Naumova, director of the Tufts University Initiative for Forecasting and Modeling of Infectious Diseases, there may be other factors that affect the likelihood of being infected by the virus. “In my opinion, all three modes of transmission occur naturally, however their relative contributions to an overall transmission pattern depend on many environmental and behavioral factors,” she says, adding that different strains of flu virus affect different age ranges and at different times of the year. Surfaces could also be re-contaminated by an infected person—all the more reason to maintain high cleanliness standards throughout flu season.

Coffee Growers Take Note: Fungi Have Sex, Too

Coffee rust

Image: Howard Schwartz, Colorado State University

Here’s news to researchers studying coffee rust, a fungal disease that has devastated coffee crops around the world for more than a hundred years: It was always assumed the coffee fungus reproduced asexually—meaning its cells split instead of fused with other cells from another host. But new research confirms they also reproduce sexually.

Coffee rust is the most economically damaging disease affecting coffee crops worldwide (estimated to cost the global coffee industry up to $3 billion a year). This new insight into the personal life of coffee fungus could help control the spread of the deadly disease in coffee and other plant life as well, including wheat grain and pine trees, which also suffer from different forms of rust fungi.

Coffee growers wage a never-ending war with fungi that escalates periodically as the disease constantly adapts to fungicides, developing increasing genetic immunity to every control the growers throw at them.

“This is the principle example of the arms race in fungi, or rust, versus their hosts,” says Shawn Kenaley, a post-doctoral associate in the plant pathology and plant-microbe biology department of Cornell University. It’s Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection at work: “Eventually there will be a selection for genes which allow for these fungi to be undetected by the coffee or able to thwart the genetic defense of coffee,” he adds.

Understanding how the fungi reproduce is vital to geneticists who are trying to stay ahead in the arms race.

Among nearly 8,000 species of rust fungi, coffee rust fungi have proven especially mysterious. Originally discovered on wild coffee in East Africa in 1861 and on cultivated coffee in Sri Lanka in 1869, coffee rust has been responsible for halting entire national exports and is considered the reason why tea became the social drink of the British in the 19th century when the disease drove the price of coffee imports too high.

“With coffee rust, it’s always been perplexing because there is this undercurrent of genetic variability that’s been there,” says Kenaley. If the coffee rust fungus only reproduced asexually (giving rise to genetically similar populations), researchers wouldn’t expect to see the amount of genetic variability in the DNA of the fungi as they observe in the lab. Yet, sexual reproduction in fungi was thought to require an alternate host—one that has never been found.

The breakthrough came when researchers determined an alternate host wasn’t actually necessary for sexual reproduction in coffee rust. Instead, one of the spores normally thought to function asexually appears to contain hidden sexual reproduction. Researchers call this cryptosexuality. In other words, these fungi are having sex and have been hiding it from us all along.

Harry Evans, plant pathologist at CABI Biosciences in Great Britain and co-author of the study that confirmed sexual reproduction of coffee rust, says his team determined the presence of sexual reproduction in the life cycle by measuring the amount of DNA in the fungi cells.

He says they observe in coffee rust fungi that “the DNA content is halved. If it were mitosis (asexual reproduction), it would be the same amount of DNA. With meiosis (sexual reproduction), because the chromosomes are splitting and going to the poles, the amount of DNA is halved. The only way of confirming this is when you measure the amount of chromatin and that can be nothing else but meiosis.”

Researchers hope to apply this new knowledge of the coffee rust life cycle to new methods for biological control of plant diseases, which sometimes employ rust fungi as a weapon to combat other types of diseases.

Evans, who has been helping control invasive weeds around the world for fifteen years, cites the 1990’s rubber-vine weed invasion in Australia as an example of successful control using rust fungi.

Originally projected to affect 600,000 square kilometers of trees and bushes throughout the country, the rubber-vine weed had already covered one-tenth of that area in 1995 when scientists introduced rust fungi by dumping massive amounts on affected plants from airplanes.

“It stopped the advance of the weed and is estimated to have saved over $250 million Australian dollars,” says Evans. “And it’s actually saved a lot of the national parks, too.”

Fear Trumps Happiness in Vocal Cues

Given only vocal cues, humans can identify fear faster in other voices than happiness, say researchers.

The cause lies in biological-survival imperatives. And the implications may prevent your next computer technical-support call from ending in a one-sided screaming match with a voice recording.

Understanding the time it takes to identify an emotion can help engineers develop better automated call centers, aid psychologists in training people with autism to learn subtle social cues, and assist public speakers to analyze the effectiveness of their speeches.

Researchers at McGill University in Canada and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany have measured the time it takes for people to correctly identify certain emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness). Experimenters speak a neutral, meaningless phrase (e.g., The rivix jolled the silling), which is then broken into seven pieces based on syllables. The time each participant takes to react to each piece is recorded.

Marc Pell, from McGill University’s School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, says emotion recognition studies of the voice are important, though rarely studied compared with facial expression.

“When you look at a face, all of the information that will allow you to recognize the emotion is available instantaneously if you’re focusing on it,” says Pell. “What is different about the voice is that emotions have to evolve over time.”

According to Pell, certain emotions require less acoustic information before participants can recognize them. Fear, anger, and sadness were among the easiest of emotions to identify (about 500 milliseconds), while happiness and disgust took two to three times as long (1000-1500 milliseconds).

Researchers think there’s a biological reason for this. The faster an emotion can be identified by sound alone, the more important it is as an evolutionary survival mechanism. Emotions that take longer to identify “might have a more social function, such as happiness,” says Pell.

Strangely, this isn’t true for all of our senses.

“If you look at facial recognition, [identifying] happy is extremely fast,” says Pell. “So there’s what we call a happy face advantage because one can very quickly determine that a face conveys happiness and yet in the voice one sees that happiness actually takes quite some time to figure out.”

How about between men and women? The study found that while men and women clearly express emotions differently, there was no difference between male and female listeners in recognizing emotions. Women may pay more attention to emotions than men, according to Pell, but their listening ability appears to be the same.

In interactions with machines, automated call centers that deal with customer support or emergencies is one common area that can benefit from emotion recognition research, according to M. Ehsan Hoque, a doctoral student in the Affective Computing Group of MIT’s Media Lab.

“Assume that an automated system can recognize the frustration in your voice,” says Hoque. “For example, someone on the road gets in an accident, calls in and gets an automated system. Assume the automated agent can sense the fear or sense of urgency in the caller’s voice and then delegate the call right away to a human responder.”

People with autism could benefit from this research as well. Because autism hinders a person’s ability to recognize subtle changes in vocal expressions like intonation and emotional context, understanding how the brain connects auditory signals with their intended meanings could help create educational programs that teach those subtle changes.

“We’re trying to understand the prosody patterns of emotion,” says Hoque. “Especially with autism, it’s not about what you say, but how you say it.”

Hoque says other applications for emotion recognition research include systems that help people analyze their own speech, either in common dialogue or in public speaking situations, so they can fine-tune details like their voice inflections, pauses and average volume to maintain interest in their audiences.

Considering the increasing automation of the man-made world, researchers like Pell see emotion research as an important next step in blurring the line between our human and artificial environments.

“I think the goal of those systems in robotics is to have naturalistic, human-like interactions and emotion is the huge thing they need to add to these systems,” says Pell. “My motivation is to understand natural human communication in its full complexity.”

Unexpected Life Found in the Not-So-Dead Sea

Researchers found green and white mats of bacteria on the bottom of the Dead Sea during a scuba diving expedition that may reveal new insights into the nature of life in extreme environments.

The sprawling communities of bacteria were found near a series of submarine freshwater springs that had never been directly observed by scientists before the summer 2010 expedition. Freshwater from a nearby aquifer must travel through several hundred feet of salty soil before emerging in the sea, creating an unusual chemical mix at the bottom of what is one of the saltiest bodies of water on the planet.

That life exists there at all is still a mystery to the joint Israeli-German research team. Principal investigator Danny Ionescu of the Microsensor Group at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, says the presence of biofilms found at the springs is an exciting new discovery.

Ionescu can’t yet reveal specific details on the identity of the bacteria, since the paper documenting the team’s results hasn’t yet been published. “In general,” says Ionescu, “the green biofilms are associated with phototrophs. The white biofilms are normally associated with sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. Never before have these been found in the Dead Sea.”

Phototrophs get their energy from light by photosynthesis, just like flowers and trees. Sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, on the other hand, manufacture their energy through chemical processes when the right ingredients are mixed together. Understanding how life can survive without photosynthesis poses an intriguing challenge for researchers.

Julie Huber, a microbial oceanographer at the Marine Biological Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, explains: “What those types of organisms are really looking for is a place where they have a source of hydrogen sulfide up against a gradient of oxygen, or methane-oxygen….And [the bacteria] are basically exploiting that gradient.”

Huber is an expert on the oddities of life near underwater volcanoes, where warm fluids leak out of the Earth’s crust and create wildly diverse ecosystems, referred to as hydrothermal vents. Similar types of bacteria have been found there, she says, and in other diverse environments all over the world, including caves, sulfur springs, and even within strange ocean currents. “Any place where you see these extreme gradients in chemistry is where you often find [sulfur-oxidizing bacteria].”

Finding these bacteria at the Dead Sea comes as a surprise to researchers, who have known for decades that the “dead” in the Dead Sea may be a misnomer, but it isn’t far from the truth.

“It is interesting as an extreme environment,” says Ionescu of the Dead Sea. “Unlike other hypersaline lakes or ponds it has a very low [bacteria] cell abundance, at between 1,000-10,000 per milliliter.” This is far lower than typical ocean ecosystems.

Because the Dead Sea contains a salt concentration of nearly 35 percent (roughly ten times saltier than the ocean), large life forms like fish and plants can’t survive there, though bacteria have been found in Dead Sea water as early as the 1930s.

Ionescu got a rare opportunity to experience the salty sea up close by serving as one of the scuba divers on the expedition. He says the team required special equipment, training, and permission to obtain their samples.

“First of all we used a full face mask—this is the most important factor, as swallowing Dead Sea water can be lethal and getting it in your eyes is also not fun,” says Ionescu. Since the high salt content makes the water unusually buoyant, he needed to wear 80 pounds of lead weights to reach the 100-foot deep springs. That’s twenty times the weight he’d normally use while diving in the ocean.

Though dangerous to reach, the Dead Sea’s freshwater springs offer an exciting training ground to better understand what makes life tick.

“Why can [the freshwater] travel over hundreds of meters without getting really saline?” wonders Christian Siebert of the Department of Catchment Hydrology at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Germany. “That’s fascinating. And in the end, we can see organisms, surviving in a toxic environment all because of this freshwater supply.”

A Virtual “What’s Up Doc” on Your Cellphone

Researchers have devised a way to project the image of a cartoon character from a cell phone onto any surface where it can then interact with another projected character from a different cell phone.

The images may wave at each other, shake hands, and even give each other presents. Might be a good way to score a date, say its creators at the MIT Media Lab.

Their recently developed prototype is called PoCoMo, for Projected Collaboration using Mobile Devices, which is the brainchild of principal investigator, first-year PhD student Roy Shilkrot.

PoCoMo uses a Samsung Halo projector phone integrated in a prototype case that employs a mirror to align the camera and the projector, along with unique computer vision algorithms, to create a simulated “ice-breaker” meet-up between an interested cartoon man and a potentially attracted cartoon woman, or vice versa.

“Initially we brainstormed fifty types of games before we came up with this idea,” says Shilkrot. “What finally brought us to this—we tried to create a social interaction in a mobile, projected way.”

Along with collaborators in the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group, first-year PhD student Seth Hunter and group director Pattie Maes, Shilkrot developed PoCoMo as the first interactive game using multiple mobile projectors in an uncontrolled environment—meaning any environment that doesn’t need a lab table and expensive equipment to run in.

By aligning the projected characters on any surface, given the proper lighting conditions, one phone runs software that tracks the position of the other phone’s character. When the potential cartoon couple is close enough, they respond—first by acknowledging the other’s presence and smiling, then waving, shaking hands, and walking together, conceivably off into the techno-sunset. Characters can even leave a present like a picture file for the other character to open, though this aspect of the tool is still in it infancy.

In developing PoCoMo, Shilkrot hoped to create a platform users could tinker with. “We wanted to use commercially available hardware and open source software so people could use this on their own,” says Shilkrot.

Mobile projector phones are commercially available today—you can buy an AT&T projector phone for under $300—and the tracking software is already available on the social coding site Github (https://github.com/royshil/HeadFollower).

Shilkrot says that PoCoMo is part of a growing interest in the tech world to expand the reach of mobile devices. New prototypes like PoCoMo that create new avenues for social interaction could eventually alter our relationships with our cell phones.

University of California-San Diego computer science researcher Lisa Cowen has explored the way in which projector phones are changing how people communicate. She led a 2010 study to investigate how people use projector phones in the real world. Her approach: hand out ten phones to ten people and see how they’re used over a four-week timeframe. Her findings suggest we may be in the market for more than just passive digital data reception.

“Projector phones have been marketed for really passive uses, where you set it down in your living room and you show pictures from your latest trip to your friends. Or they’ve been marketed to people in a business environment for giving presentations on the fly,” says Cowen.

Yet, during the study, people used their phones mostly in jest by projecting playful images like sharks and donuts at walls and tables near their friends, explains Cowen. “We found that people really used these in active ways. They’re very playful. They’re not just setting a projector down. They’re really using them to communicate, not just for the content being presented.”

“(We) try to imagine these devices as not just a teleportal out of your current environment, but as actually being a productive part of that environment,” says Bill Griswold, Cowen’s advisor and head of the Ubiquitous Computing and Social Dynamics Group at UCSD.

Shilkrot sees a similar vision in PoCoMo. “Just in time, just in place,” is the motto of PoCoMo, according to the MIT student. He says interactive mobile projection devices could blur the line between our digital screens and the objects around us. “One of the reasons we created this project was to break free from the screens that we stare at all day,” he says.