Author: Claudinne Miller
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
Four ways COVID changed virology: lessons from the most sequenced virus of all time
Nature After 150,000 articles and 17 million genome sequences, what has science taught us about SARS-CoV-2? Kei Sato was looking for his next big challenge five years ago when it smacked him — and the world — in the face. The virologist had recently started an independent group at the University of Tokyo and was […]
Mar 19, 2025
The COVID Mistake No One Talks Enough About
The Atlantic Deaths in isolation have been treated as a painful memory, not as a problem that hospitals need to address. He was one of the few ICU patients whose face I saw in early 2021, when COVID raged through Los Angeles. As a palliative-care physician, my job was to meet, over Zoom, with the […]
Mar 18, 2025