epidemiology

A man walks through a flooded street with his belongings in the Orlovista neighborhood following Hurricane Ian on October 1, 2022 in Orlando, Florida.Photo: BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP (Getty Images)Hurricane Ian hit Florida as category 4 storm in late September, bringing torrential rains and a storm surge that left much of coastal and central Florida underwater. But while the immediate dangers involved drowning and injuries, an invisible threat would soon sicken some people who came in contact with the water: flesh-eating…

Graham Colby, one of the study scientists, took this photo of researchers drilling into Lake Hazen’s ice to collect sediment samples in 2017.Photo: Graham Colby (Getty Images)In the Canadian High Arctic, climate change is bringing together viruses and potential hosts in new combinations, according to recently published research. Every novel interaction increases the risk of “viral spillover,” i.e.,pathogens jumping to different hosts. And every instance of spillover is an opportunity for a virus to become more…

The candidate that’s farthest along is the single-dose ChAd3 Ebola Sudan vaccine, which is being developed by the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. By working with the World Health Organization (WHO), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and other organizations, the institute is planning to run a clinical trial in the current outbreak to see how well the vaccine works.But there are only 100 doses available. With limited supply, health officials plan to give doses of the vaccine…

Though Bd swept through Central America from the 1980s to the 2000s, the analysis that demonstrated its effect on human health could be accomplished only recently, says Michael Springborn, the paper’s lead author and a professor and environmental and resource economist at UC Davis. “The data existed, but it wasn’t easily obtainable,” he says. Over the years, though, county-level disease records were digitized at the ministries of health in Costa Rica and Panama, providing an opportunity to combine that epidemiology in a…

Add to that: There’s little past experience with the vaccine, known as Jynneos in the US, being used against this disease. It was only approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019, primarily for the prevention of smallpox in case that virus—eradicated from circulation by an earlier vaccine, but retained in two labs—was ever used as a biological weapon. Jynneos underwent human safety studies but was never tested for efficacy against monkeypox in people; those estimates are based on animal work. It has never been…

Add to that: There’s little past experience with the vaccine, known as Jynneos in the US, being used against this disease. It was only approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019, primarily for the prevention of smallpox in case that virus—eradicated from circulation by an earlier vaccine, but retained in two labs—was ever used as a biological weapon. It underwent human safety studies, but was never tested for efficacy against monkeypox in people; those estimates are based on animal work. Jynneos has never…

It was overuse of acetaminophen that finally led to Nic Petermann’s cancer diagnosis. For months, the then 26-year-old had been contending with exhaustion, night sweats, recurring fevers, and abdominal pain so debilitating that she regularly woke up in the middle of the night to take soothing baths. Her persistent flu-like symptoms, she’d read online, were probably just the lingering effects of a Covid infection she’d had in January 2021; the pain was the odd symptom out, but an ultrasound had turned up nothing.Come June,…

The study of the causes of diseases and their spread will continue to be crucial, particularly as climate change presents us with new health challenges and worsens the threat of pandemics. “Epidemiology provides analytic tools to better understand and respond to the urgent problems we are facing now, which will only become more urgent in the future: extreme weather, climate migration, loss of biodiversity, new zoonotic diseases that emerge from human-wildlife contact, extreme social inequity, war and violence, and more,”…

You were one of those people with four doses.That’s right, and I was also able to get a prophylactic monoclonal antibody. That’s probably why I think I got a relatively mild disease. But it persisted for 17 days, and I had to have two courses of Paxlovid.By the way, I don't think we should call this a rebound. A better way to say it is that we don’t have the dosing schedule correct. It’s possible that Paxlovid probably requires a course of seven or 10 days.So if I get Covid, I can ask my doctor to give me seven or 10…

Second, the longer this virus continues, the more variants we’re going to have. We don’t know exactly what forms a variant, but for sure one factor is immunocompromised people who have the virus puttering around longer in their system—not for 17 days like me, but for months. The body can’t clear the virus completely. You’ve created ideal circumstances for reassortment, recombination.Another issue is that we don’t have a good handle on numbers because we never got testing, right?What if I said to you that antigens, those…