Infectious Disease
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Ghana's 1.7 Million 'Climate' Diarrhea Cases Come From a Model Where Risk Falls in the Hottest Months
Built on a UK-led official-statistics framework, the estimate compares 12 years of Ghanaian weather against a benchmark set by a rule that resolved to the 95th percentile. It does not measure climate change, and each weather exposure accounts for 5.5 percent of cases.
Infectious DiseaseThe Hepatitis B Shot America Calls Essential on Day One: Ontario Gives It in Grade 7
Ontario's routine hepatitis B program starts in grade 7, and Canada reported four acute cases in children under 15 in 2021. In the U.S., a court order keeps the universal shot in the first hours of life.
Infectious DiseaseBacteria Spot a Virus by the One Tool It Can't Fake, Then Self-Destruct to Save the Colony
To catch an invading virus, bacteria ignore its genes and watch for the enzyme it needs to build its shell. The moment that enzyme cuts, the cell wrecks its own membrane to spare its neighbors.
Infectious DiseaseActors Faked Bird Flu at 69 ERs and Clinics, and Triage Still Asked the 2016 Question
The actor's secret was a sick duck from Central Park, and only 7 of 73 triage desks asked about animals. Ten years after New York's first mystery-patient drills, the front door got slower.
Infectious DiseaseThe 'Pac-Man' Enzyme That Eats Bioplastic Also Breaks Down Penicillin
Konstanz researchers pulled an enzyme from forest soil that digests an experimental bioplastic and also cuts open penicillin. The press release says every bioplastic completely degraded. The paper's carbon numbers and the intact buried films say otherwise, and nobody put the gene in a living bacteri
Infectious DiseaseA Week of Immunology, a Shared Hotel and a 'Transformative' Claim With No Alumni Count
Nine IUIS educators call their one-week immunology courses in low- and middle-income countries transformative. Their 2022 guidelines say the committee's budget partly funds 3 courses a year, and the program's 2019 self-assessment measured enjoyment and quiz scores, not careers.
Infectious DiseaseThe Gut Lining Was Supposed to Be Plumbing. A 500,000-Cell Atlas Caught It Fighting Each Microbe Differently.
Six microbes, six different reprogrammings of the intestinal lining, including a cell state that appears only during one bacterial infection and concentrates inside the lesions that bug builds.
Infectious DiseaseForty-Five Years After Acyclovir, the FDA's Herpes Headline Is a Warning Letter to Amazon
Some 520 million people carry the virus behind most genital herpes, and no drug clears it. The FDA's October move was a warning letter over herpes ointments and washes sold on Amazon.
Infectious DiseaseA Siberian Plague Lab Lost a Scientist, and Moscow Is Asking for the Trust It Burned at Sverdlovsk
Daria Shipilova, 28, studied plague in Irkutsk until a severe pneumonia killed her, and about 200 people were quarantined. The biology says stay calm. The history says make Moscow show its work.
Infectious DiseaseMonths After the FDA Recalled These Frozen Clams, No One Can Say Which Ecuadorian Waters Contaminated Them
Thirty-seven people across four states, thirty of them hospitalized, all linked to La Serranita black-shell clams imported frozen from Ecuador. The source waters are still under investigation.
Infectious DiseaseFor Nineteen Years, Bundibugyo Was a Footnote in the Ebola Family. It Has Killed More Than 3,000 People Since Congo Confirmed It in May.
Congo confirmed a little-known Ebola cousin on May 15. By September it had reached 61 health zones, killed nearly half of its confirmed patients, and traveled abroad in infected and evacuated people, and the celebrated Ebola vaccine was never built to stop it.
Infectious DiseaseFor 400 Years After the Black Death, Plague Kept Walking Back Into Europe on War Roads
Twenty-six sets of medieval teeth trace Yersinia pestis splitting into three branches around 1500, with the later lineages tracking the roads armies and refugees traveled. The pattern points to repeated re-introductions, plus some strains that may have dug in locally.
Infectious DiseaseCzech Trust in Government Fell to 19 Percent. Eight to Ten Weeks Later, the Death Rate Pulled Away from Austria's.
A populist government overstated its testing, cycled through health ministers, and governed by press conference. Czechs stopped believing it, and a new analysis ties that collapse of faith to a death rate that ran roughly twice the European average.
Infectious DiseaseThe FDA Is Fighting a Flesh-Eating Parasite We Eradicated in 1966 With a Flea Pill From 2000
Nitenpyram was approved in 2000 to kill fleas. It is now the emergency tool against a parasite the United States wiped out in 1966, after the sterile-fly barrier that kept the screwworm out was breached in 2023.
Infectious DiseaseA 2014 Trial Warned That Correcting Vaccine Fears Backfires on the Hesitant. Public Health Corrected Harder.
A randomized trial found that correcting MMR-autism fears left the most hesitant parents less likely to vaccinate. A decade later, a panel of credentialed doctors in Sydney shows the trust cost of correcting harder anyway.
Infectious DiseaseRattlesnakes Carry Their Own Antivenom in Their Blood, and in Mice a Cocktail of It Beat CroFab Tenfold
Rattlesnakes shrug off key parts of their own venom. Biologists found the blood proteins behind that trick, mixed them, and in mice the cocktail neutralized diamondback venom about 10 times better than the commercial antivenom.
Infectious DiseaseIn 1999, Fifteen Reports Suspended a Vaccine Within Weeks. The Spike Signal Has Waited Years for a Study.
Spike protein has turned up in the vessel-lining cells of vasculitic skin lesions 18 months after the shot, and adverse-event reports keep stacking up. The agencies that suspended a vaccine over fifteen reports in 1999 now call thousands a coincidence.
Infectious DiseaseWeathered Plastic in the Water Grows Its Own City of Drug-Resistant Bacteria
On weathered plastic drifting from a lake into a river, researchers logged 102 new antibiotic-resistance gene subtypes moving into the surrounding water in five weeks.
Infectious DiseaseThe HIV Reservoir Everyone Called Untouchable Has Natural Killer Cell Fingerprints All Over It
In 104 people on long-term HIV treatment, the ones whose natural killer cells were armed a certain way carried far fewer intact copies of the virus. The reservoir that defeats every cure turns out to carry the fingerprints of an immune fight nobody thought was happening.
Infectious DiseaseForty Years of Calling ME/CFS Psychosomatic Taught the Institutions How to Dismiss the Vaccine-Injured
Immune exhaustion ties ME/CFS to long COVID. A Yale preprint finds the same signatures in the vaccine-injured, plus spike protein still circulating 709 days after a COVID shot. The institutions that spent decades dismissing the first are dismissing the rest.
Infectious DiseaseThe Anti-Mosquito Industry Sells a Fix for Something Your Skin Chemistry Settled Years Ago
One volunteer drew 100 times more mosquitoes than another, a difference set by skin acids that hold steady for years. The wristbands, ultrasonic gadgets and vitamin-B patches sold to stop the bites show no measurable protection.
Infectious DiseaseFor Sixty Years the Screwworm Was Gone. It's Back in Texas, and the FDA Reached for Its COVID-Era Emergency Powers.
The flesh-eating fly the US wiped out in 1966 has crossed the southern border into Texas, and Washington's answer leans on the same emergency law it used for COVID drugs, this time to slap an emergency label on Zoetis's best-selling dog pill.
Infectious DiseaseArizona State's AI Flags Healthy People as 'Weak' Vaccine Responders Without Reporting How Often It's Right
Arizona State's AI sorts roughly one in twenty healthy people into the 'weak responder' column. The clinical payoff, in the lead author's own words, is more doses. Nobody reported how often the model is right.
Infectious DiseaseKindergarten Vaccine Exemptions Doubled in Five Years. The Number Is a Verdict on the Agencies, Not the Parents.
Exemptions climbed to a record 4.2 percent of kindergartners while medical exemptions never budged from 0.2 percent. The rise is not a medical event. It is five years of institutional credibility spent, showing up in the one column parents control.