Category: Emerging Infectious Diseases
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
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
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
Should You Get a Measles Vaccine Booster?
Yale Medicine As cases increase in some places, a Yale Medicine specialist reviews the groups, including some adults, who should get vaccinated. These days, most people are vaccinated against measles, a highly contagious, life-threatening respiratory virus, when they are children. But recent reports that measles is spreading in parts of the United States are prompting some […]
Mar 18, 2025
Japanese encephalitis has claimed a second life in NSW and been detected in Brisbane. What is it?
The Conversation A second man has died from Japanese encephalitis virus in New South Wales on March 6, the state’s health authorities confirmed on Friday. Aged in his 70s, the man was infected while holidaying in the Murrumbidgee region. This follows the death of another man in his 70s in Sydney last month, after holidaying in the same region […]
Mar 18, 2025
NIH-sponsored trial of Lassa vaccine opens
NIH Lassa fever is a viral hemorrhagic disease that can be fatal and that causes permanent hearing loss. A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored clinical trial of a candidate vaccine to prevent Lassa fever has begun enrolling participants at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore. Lassa fever is a viral hemorrhagic disease that […]
Mar 18, 2025