Category: Emerging Infectious Diseases
Toll in Rwanda Marburg outbreak rises to 11
Medical Express Five more people in Rwanda have died of the deadly Ebola-like Marburg disease, bringing the number of fatalities to 11, the health ministry said late Tuesday. With a fatality rate of up to 88 percent, the highly infectious hemorrhagic fever is often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure. Some 29 people have been confirmed to […]
Oct 2, 2024
‘Highly aggressive’ day-biting mosquitoes found in Santa Clara
Santa Clara News A “highly aggressive” mosquito species that feeds “almost exclusively on humans” was detected in Santa Clara, county officials warned on Monday. The county’s Vector Control District found Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in a residential area of the City of Santa Clara. The district identified 58 mosquitoes surrounding Agate Drive and Moraine Drive. Aedes aegypti […]
Oct 2, 2024
3 Things to Know About XEC, the Latest COVID Strain
Yale Medicine Experts think this new, highly transmissible variant could soon take hold in the U.S. A new highly transmissible coronavirus subvariant is starting to spread in the United States. Experts say it could become the dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain just in time for winter, when COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations tend to peak. The variant is called XEC. […]
Oct 2, 2024
First human case of emerging tick-borne disease reported in Connecticut
NBC Local News The first locally acquired case of an emerging tick-borne disease has been reported in Connecticut. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station said this is the first locally acquired human case of Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis in Connecticut and it’s also the first report of the disease in the northeast. Dr. Peter Krause, a Yale […]
Oct 2, 2024
Valley fever is a growing risk in Central California; few visitors ever get a warning
Los Angeles Times Some experts warn that the fungus that causes valley fever is growing increasingly resistant to drugs — a phenomenon they say is due to the spraying of antifungal agents on area crops. In 2001, fewer than 1,500 Californians were diagnosed with valley fever. Last year, that number rose to more than 9,000. […]
Oct 2, 2024
California faces ‘unprecedented’ local spread of dengue fever, possibly driven by climate change
The HIll California last week clocked its fourth case of locally transmitted dengue fever this year — an alarming rise in a sometimes-deadly disease that experts fear could be fueled by climate change. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health confirmed the newest incidence of the mosquito-borne illness in a resident of Panorama City, a neighborhood in […]
Oct 2, 2024
Deadly Marburg virus: scientists race to test vaccines in outbreak
Nature There are no approved treatments for the Ebola-like haemorrhagic fever, which is spreading in Rwanda. Researchers are in a race against time to deploy vaccines and treatments against a deadly virus that has exploded in Rwanda. As of 30 September, the central African country has recorded 27 cases and 9 deaths caused by Marburg virus, […]
Oct 2, 2024
When Nerve Pain and Numbness Are Linked to Long COVID
Yale Medicine Our nerves help us sense, react to, and change our surroundings. Simply put, our nerves are our connection to the world. This connection is disrupted, however, when peripheral neuropathy strikes. The peripheral nervous system starts when nerves leave the spinal cord and ends when the nerves reach our tissues. Peripheral neuropathy, defined as […]
Oct 2, 2024
Sex workers find themselves at the center of Congo’s mpox outbreak
AP It’s been four months since Sifa Kunguja recovered from mpox, but as a sex worker, she said, she’s still struggling to regain clients, with fear and stigma driving away people who’ve heard she had the virus. “It’s risky work,” Kunguja, 40, said from her small home in eastern Congo. “But if I don’t work, I […]
Oct 2, 2024
CEPI Dr Jean-Jacques Muyembe was a newly-qualified microbiologist working as a field epidemiologist when he got a call in 1976 to help investigate an outbreak. A pernicious disease had taken hold in the village of Yambuku in central Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. People were dying in large numbers of the infection – one that […]
Oct 2, 2024