Category: Science and Tech
What’s Really Going on With Bird Flu Wastewater Data
Bloomberg With Covid, sewers provided a leading indicator of a surge in infections. But H5N1 is proving much tougher to track that way. During Covid, public health experts and armchair epidemiologists became obsessed with poop — or, more accurately, the secrets it held about the state of the pandemic. Wastewater, which can measure how much […]
Jun 19, 2024
How hunters are helping researchers track the spread of tick-borne diseases
MedPageToday Tick-borne diseases are on the rise throughout the country — and a unique collaboration between hunters and researchers is helping to bring more information to light. Hunters are checking the animals they catch for ticks and then sending them to be tested for infections in a program with Baylor University and the Texas Parks and […]
Jun 18, 2024
Bird flu is increasingly adapting to mammals
University of California Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza viruses are becoming increasingly flexible and are adapting to mammals in new ways that could have global consequences for humans, wildlife and livestock, according to a new study of a massive outbreak among elephant seals in Argentina in 2023. The study, published as a preprint and co-led by University […]
Jun 11, 2024
These are the bird flu questions that influenza and animal scientists desperately want answered
STAT en weeks after government scientists discovered that H5N1 bird flu was sickening dairy cattle in the United States, many of the mysteries surrounding what is happening on affected farms remain just that. Widespread reluctance on the part of farmers to allow scientists — government or otherwise — onto their premises to study spread of the […]
Jun 5, 2024
NIH releases H5N1 influenza research agenda
Eureka Alert The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has released its plan for advancing H5N1 influenza basic research and translating those findings into strategies and interventions that can benefit people. The research agenda focuses on four key objectives: increasing understanding of the biology of H5N1 […]
Jun 5, 2024
A new discovery about carbon dioxide is challenging decades-old ventilation doctrine
STAT Carbon dioxide monitors have been around for decades. But in 2020, they became, almost overnight, a hot commodity. All of a sudden, people wanted them to help assess the safety of indoor spaces — to gauge the likelihood of breathing in coronavirus-laced particles that until very recently had been in someone else’s lungs. No […]
Jun 4, 2024
CDC CDC has sequenced the influenza virus genome identified in a conjunctival specimen collected from the person in Michigan who was identified to be infected with HPAI A(H5N1) virus and compared each gene segment with HPAI A(H5N1) sequences from cows, wild birds and poultry and the first human case in Texas. The virus HA was […]
May 29, 2024
Medical Express Vaccination remains the most effective strategy for avian influenza prevention and control in humans, despite varying vaccine efficacy across strains. That’s according to the authors of a new review which delves into existing research into bird flu vaccines for humans. Published in the journal Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, the results of the paper are […]
May 29, 2024
Bird flu in U.S. cows caught scientists by surprise. Canadian research has seen it coming since 1953
CBC Older lab studies showed flu viruses like H5N1 can spread through unusual routes, but may have been overlooked. When U.S. dairy cows began falling ill with a dangerous form of bird flu, many scientists were struck by an unusual pattern: The virus kept showing up in cows’ udders, of all places. Influenza is usually […]
May 28, 2024
Body lice may have spread plague more than thought, science suggests
NBC News Lab experiments support the possibility that the blood-sucking bugs may have played a role in the rapid spread of the plague in the Middle Ages. Scientists have long debated whether human body lice might have helped drive the rapid spread of the bacteria responsible for the deadly plague in the Middle Ages, known as […]
May 21, 2024