By Amanda Musa and Carma Hassan, CNN About 92% of US children have been vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella by age 2, according to the CDC – below the federal target of 95%.George Frey/Getty ImagesCNNNearly a dozen cases of measles have been reported in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia in recent weeks, according to local...
F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCEDISCLOSURES Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine. How do you tell if a condition is caused by an infection? It seems like an obvious question, right? In the post–van Leeuwenhoek era we...
by Cynthia McCormick Hibbert, Northeastern University Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The COVID-19 subvariant XBB.1.5 is spreading so fast that the World Health Organization on Friday advised people to wear masks in certain situations, including in crowded, enclosed and poorly ventilated spaces, regardless of local infection rates. The announcement came three days after the WHO recommended...
In the midst of a discussion regarding the limitations of life span studies, in that the use of death as an endpoint fails to capture all of the variances in health due to aging, the authors of this paper offer up the thought that aging is contagious within the body. Declines in one cell spread to another,...
by University of Texas at Austin The number of virus strains present in each zip code in Houston during the second wave of COVID-19 cases in summer 2020. Number of strains is represented by a spectrum of colors from blue (0 strains) to red (50 strains). A study involving more than 5,000 COVID-19 patients in Houston...
Everything epidemiology can tell us about the new coronavirus. Matthew R. Francis Scientists, medical professionals, and governments around the world are working to understand how the new respiratory disease ravaging Hubei province spreads—and how bad it could be for the rest of the world. Part of this effort is epidemiology: the study of how infections...
by Steven Reinberg, Healthday Reporter (HealthDay)—You’ve probably never heard of Q fever, but the bacterial disease may be sickening—and killing—more Americans than once believed, a new study suggests. Caused by a bacteria carried by livestock, Query (Q) fever is a rare disease first discovered in 1947 and is found mostly in dry, dusty areas of California and the Southwest. “Q fever is under...
The state veterinarian, Dr. Jeff Kaisand, says several cases of canine brucellosis have been confirmed at a commercial breeding facility for small dogs in Marion County. The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship says it is notifying people who have custody of the exposed dogs. Both the animals and the facilities are quarantined while the dogs undergo testing....
So far, six animal species are known to carry transmissible, “parasitic” forms of cancer, but researchers are still mystified as to how cancer can become infectious. Apr 1, 2019 KATARINA ZIMMER The untrained eye likely wouldn’t have noticed, but doctoral student Ruth Pye immediately spotted something unusual about the way the cells were arranged in a tissue...
