Author: Claudinne Miller

Dairy cattle in Texas and Kansas test positive for bird flu

MPR News Milk from dairy cows in Texas and Kansas has tested positive for bird flu, U.S. officials said Monday. Officials with the Texas Animal Health Commission confirmed the flu virus is the Type A H5N1 strain, known for decades to cause outbreaks in birds and to occasionally infect people. The virus is affecting older dairy […]

Mar 26, 2024

What we learned about long COVID 4 years later

ABC News (Video) Millions of Americans are still experiencing long COVID more than four years since the global COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic.

Mar 26, 2024

There’s a New Fungus in Town and It Won’t Be the Last

MedPageToday The arrival of C. auris in Washington is a harbinger of health systems addled by climate change. For healthcare systems in the Pacific Northwest, the recent outbreaks  of Candida auris (C. auris) serve as a wake-up call. The implications of the arrival of this resilient and drug-resistant fungal pathogen are profound, particularly for our most vulnerable patients who are […]

Mar 26, 2024

COVID-19 Antibody Discovery Could Explain Long COVID

UVA UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential explanation for some of the most perplexing mysteries of COVID-19 and long COVID. The surprising findings could lead to new treatments for the difficult acute effects of COVID-19, long COVID and possibly other viruses. Researchers led by UVA’s Steven L. Zeichner, MD, PhD, found that COVID-19 may […]

Mar 26, 2024

Florida reports 11th measles case of 2024, this time linked to international travel

Orlando Sentinal Florida reported another measles case on Friday, bringing the state’s total to 11 cases this year amid a worldwide uptick in a highly infectious disease once thought to be eliminated in the U.S. The case was identified in South Florida’s Martin County, in an individual age 55-59. It was linked to travel outside […]

Mar 26, 2024

People more often are origin of infectious diseases in animals than vice versa, data suggest

CIDRAP People pass twice as many viruses to domestic and wild animals than animals pass to people, concludes a study today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. University College London (UCL) researchers analyzed genomic data on nearly 12 million viruses in 32 viral families using network and evolutional analyses to characterize the mutations behind recent vertebrate species jumps. Most emerging and re-emerging […]

Mar 26, 2024

Japan warns on surge in potentially deadly strep throat cases

Reuters Japanese health authorities have warned about a jump in potentially deadly strep throat infections, with cases running about three times higher than last year in Tokyo. Across the country, infections of streptococcus bacteria of the throat are being diagnosed at quadruple the pace of the past five years, according to a health ministry report […]

Mar 26, 2024

This Extremely Rare Neurological Condition Makes Faces Appear Distorted or ‘Like a Demon’

Smithsonian For the first time, scientists have recreated what one patient suffering from prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, sees when he looks at faces. One winter morning roughly three years ago, Victor Sharrah woke up and spotted his roommate walking to the bathroom. However, when Sharrah looked at his roommate’s face, he was startled to see that […]

Mar 26, 2024

Ventilation Can Reduce Exposure to Respiratory Viruses in Indoor Spaces

CDC Levels of respiratory disease continue to decline nationally from the peak around late December. But even as we move past winter, it is important to remember that respiratory viruses are still spreading at elevated levels, with some spreading throughout the year. Ventilation can reduce respiratory virus transmission By using core strategies, like vaccination and practicing good hygiene, […]

Mar 26, 2024

How do we halt the next pandemic? Be kind to critters like bats, says a new paper

NPR Almost every pandemic we’ve seen over the last century has come from a virus that’s spilled over into humans from an animal. “Generally, pandemics are seen as a biomedical problem,” says Raina Plowright, an infectious disease ecologist at Cornell University. “Certainly, once the pandemic is underway, it is a biomedical problem because you need to […]

Mar 26, 2024