Author: Claudinne Miller
Long-Term COVID-19 Is Real
Psychology Today Several months after the COVID-19 pandemic started, I began seeing COVID-19 survivors who suffered from a variety of symptoms long after they were first infected. They mainly complained about debilitating fatigue, brain fog, memory problems, difficulty concentrating, difficulty completing tasks, muscle pains, etc. Some of them were highly functioning individuals who were desperate to return to […]
Mar 25, 2025
What the COVID-19 pandemic tells us about how viruses evolve
NPR arly in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists predicted the coronavirus would mutate slowly. They were wrong. Hundreds of thousands of viral mutations and multiple seasonal waves later, researchers now know why. Turns out, SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes the disease COVID-19 — was making evolutionary leaps and bounds in one specific group of people. “When […]
Mar 25, 2025
UK draws up new disease-threat watch list
BBC The UK has a new watch list of 24 infectious diseases that could pose the greatest future threat to public health. Some are viruses with global pandemic potential – like Covid – while others are illnesses that have no existing treatments or could cause significant harm. Avian, or bird, flu is on the list, […]
Mar 25, 2025
Clade I Mpox Outbreak Originating in Central Africa
CDC Since January 1, 2024, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and several neighboring countries in Central and Eastern Africa have confirmed through laboratory testing more than 21,000 mpox cases and more than 65 deaths. There have also been travel-associated cases in other parts of Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, and South America. The risk […]
Mar 19, 2025
Health official warns of prolonged measles outbreak as cases rise in TX, NM, OK
KOMO A measles outbreak has continued to spread across Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, with 321 confirmed cases as of Tuesday — an increase of 25 cases from Friday. Texas is bearing the brunt of the outbreak, with the majority of the cases reported in the state. The Texas Department of State Health Services on Tuesday reported […]
Mar 19, 2025
Close Relative of Highly Fatal Coronavirus Discovered in Brazil’s Bats
Science Alert Brazil’s bats are harboring a vast and diverse pool of coronaviruses, a new study finds, including a newly identified strain that may pose a danger to human health in the years to come. Scientists are taking the threat seriously and will soon conduct testing in a secure lab to see if the variant […]
Mar 19, 2025
Vaccine hesitancy is about much more than misinformation
STAT When the first Covid-19 vaccines were developed, I felt cautiously optimistic. As a sociologist focused on public health, I believed these scientific breakthroughs would mark the beginning of the end of the pandemic. Yet vaccine hesitancy presented an ongoing obstacle to public health efforts. Public discussion names misinformation and political polarization as the primary […]
Mar 19, 2025
How vulnerable might humans be to bird flu? Scientists see hope in existing immunity
NPR Bird flu has ripped through the animal kingdom for the past few years now, killing countless birds and crossing into an alarming number of mammals. Yet people remain largely untouched. Even though the official tally of human cases in the U.S. is most certainly an undercount, there’s still no evidence this strain of H5N1 has spread widely among […]
Mar 19, 2025
Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the Pandemic? What Failed?
NYT As the coronavirus spread, researchers worldwide scrambled to find ways to keep people safe. Some efforts were misguided. Others saved millions of lives. Until 2020, few Americans needed to think about how viruses spread or how the human immune system works. The pandemic offered a painful crash course. Sometimes, it seemed that the science […]
Mar 19, 2025
Antiviral drug ensitrelvir shows promise in preventing household COVID spread
CIDRAP People who started taking the antiviral drug ensitrelvir within 72 hours after a household member tested positive for COVID-19 were significantly less likely to be infected, according to results from an international phase 3 clinical trial presented last week at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco. Made by Japanese pharmaceutical firm Shionogi, […]
Mar 19, 2025