Ilaria Capua

Explore about the Famous Politician Ilaria Capua, who was born in Italy on April 21, 1966. Analyze Ilaria Capua’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Ilaria Capua dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Ilaria Capua?

Ilaria Capua Biography

Born in Rome in 1966, Ilaria Capua graduated with honors in veterinary medicine from the University of Perugia in 1989. In 1991, she completed a post-graduate specialization course in animal health and hygiene at the University of Pisa. She obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Padua in 2007 on avian influenza epidemiology, inter-species transmission and control.

Ilaria Capua (Rome, April 21, 1966) is a virologist and former Italian politician, best known for her research on influenza viruses, particularly avian influenza, and her efforts promoting open access to genetic information on emerging viruses as part of pre-pandemic preparedness efforts.

In 1999-2000, responding to a persistent but relatively non-virulent strain of H7N1 avian flu hindering Italy’s commercial poultry industry, Capua and collaborators developed an innovative approach, which was dubbed the “DIVA” strategy (Differentiating Infected from Vaccinated Animals) as a tool to support eradication practices. The strategy involved inoculating poultry with an inactivated vaccine derived from an antigenically related H7N3 virus—coupled with a diagnostic test directed to identifying antibodies to the neuramminidase antigen, that revealed whether avian-flu antibodies present in a subject animal were caused by the H7N3 vaccine or by the field H7N1 virus. Once approved by the European Union, the program went live in November 2000. The strategy enabled Italy’s poultry industry to continue trade and the target pathogen was eradicated from Italy. Today, DIVA is among the strategies recommended by the European Union to combat avian influenza on a global scale.

A veterinarian by training, Capua has mainly worked in the field of veterinary virology and zoonotic viral infections. She worked for over twenty years in the network of the Istituti Zooprofilattici in Italy, and headed the national and international reference laboratory for Newcastle disease and Avian Influenza at IZSVE for over ten years. In response to the 1999-2000 outbreak of avian flu in Italy, Capua and colleagues proposed and developed a novel strategy for vaccinating commercial poultry against the disease, which was adopted and enabled the industry to avoid complete shutdown.

Ilaria Capua is married to a Scotsman, Richard, and has a daughter born in 2004.

During the outbreak of panzootic H5N1 influenza, which could be transmitted from birds to people, Capua’s lab in Padua received a sample of the viral strain recently introduced in Nigeria for typing and characterization. Capua believed that broader circulation of knowledge related to genetic information on contemporary viruses was essential to improve preparedness and response, and declined the offer to submit the genetic sequence to a password-protected database as suggested by WHO. Instead, she decided to deposit the genetic sequences to GenBank, a publicly accessible database, to make it available to the entire scientific community. On February 16, 2006, Capua contacted about 50 of her colleagues and encouraged them to deposit avian influenza genetic sequences in publicly accessible databases. The journal Science reported on Capua’s effort, stating that she had “renewed the debate about how to balance global health against scientists’ needs to publish and countries’ demands for secrecy.”

In February 2006, Capua drew international attention when she challenged the existing system for granting scientists access to genetic material sequenced from influenza viruses. At the peak of the H5N1 panzootic, Capua decided to post the sequence of the first H5N1 African virus on a publicly accessible website (GenBank) rather than contribute the data to a password-protected database maintained in Los Alamos and accessible only to a small group of researchers. During this time, Capua led an international campaign promoting free access to genetic sequences derived from influenza viruses and other viruses with pandemic potential. One observer described Capua as “belonging to a longstanding tradition of scientists rebelling against established ideas and the upper echelon among their colleagues” but also advocating a new outlook in which scientific cooperation is “enacted directly between scientists and not mediated by institutions.”

In January 2013, Capua was asked to run for a seat on the Italian Parliament by Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister at the time, who sought to add scientists and academics to Parliament. Capua accepted, and in February 2013 was elected a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, one of the two divisions of the Italian Parliament. Capua served for over two years as vice president of the Commission for Science, Culture, and Education of the Chamber of Deputies.

Recently, Capua has been coordinator of the work group on Avian Influenza of EPIZONE scientific excellence network, which has been set up to improve the control of the epizootic diseases in Europe. It consists of more than 300 researchers from 16 international research centres – two of them outside Europe. Epizone is a new European Commission project under the sixth research framework programme (FP6), priority 5 (food quality and safety), and it has a budget of €14 million over five years.

In 2014, while she was a parliamentarian, the Italian weekly magazine l’Espresso revealed that Capua had been the subject of a ten-year criminal investigation by Italian police. The magazine’s cover article reported a conspiracy between scientists and pharmaceutical companies to increase the sales of vaccines by deliberately spreading viruses.

In July 2016, Capua was cleared of all charges by the judge for preliminary investigation of the Court of Verona, because “there was no case to answer.” The judge’s decision mentioned that “there was evidence of fabrication of evidence against her.”

Ilaria Capua resigned as a member of the Italian Parliament on September 28, 2016. Her resignation speech was published in the first page of Corriere della Sera.

Since June 2016, Capua has been a faculty member with the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, U.S. At UF, she has continued to advocate for interdisciplinary work and open science, particularly open access to research data on pandemic diseases.

Capua’s initiative was covered by the international press including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The English-language scientific press continued to cover the debate, as did mainstream European press.

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