Author: Claudinne Miller
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
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
New Indiana CWD case detected, DNR recommends hunter vigilance
The Republic A tiny spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) was recently detected in Indiana among white-tail deer. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources announced a second CWD case within the state’s borders in late February, found in Posey County. Although deer hunting season does not begin until September, the news was released to the […]
Mar 18, 2025