infectious

Polio is endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2022. Credit: Sarah Poser, Meredith Boyter Newlove/CDCOn July 21, 2022, New York state health officials announced the first case of polio in the U.S. since 2013. The U.S. resident, who is suffering from muscle weakness and paralysis had not been vaccinated.Before safe and effective vaccines were invented in the mid-20th century, polio was a common cause of paralysis in children. Thanks to global vaccination campaigns, polio is now almost eradicated. There have only been…

Thousands of years ago, across the Eastern Mediterranean, multiple Bronze Age civilizations took a distinct turn for the worse at around the same time.The Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire both collapsed, and there was a widespread societal crisis across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, manifesting as declining populations, destruction, reduced trade, and significant cultural changes.  As usual, fingers have been pointed at climate change and shifting allegiances. But scientists have just found a new…

The research reveals the threshold of exercise at which aerosol particle emissions increase exponentially.The relationship between exercise intensity and infection riskThe relationship between exercise intensity and the emission and concentration of aerosol particles in exhaled air has not been well understood up to this point. A Munich research team has shown using a unique experimental setup that aerosol emissions rise exponentially with high levels of physical activity. This means indoor athletic events have an…

via Shudder Being the morbid bunch that we are, any and all movies about viral infections have skyrocketed in popularity since the beginning of 2020, because nothing screams “escapist entertainment” better than spending pandemic-induced downtime watching people suffer from a transmissible disease. One early beneficiary was Shudder’s The Beach House, which has now packed up and headed somewhere else for the summer, and found just as much success. As per FlixPatrol, writer and director Jeffrey A. Brown’s…

Sam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz are two of experimental pop music’s most unlikely creative partners. Gendel, 35, is the Los Angeles saxophonist who has lent his talents to records by Vampire Weekend, Maggie Rogers and Perfume Genius, all while maintaining a prolific solo practice that’s among the most appealingly unpredictable in modern jazz. Cytrynowicz is a classic multi-hyphenate – a singer-songwriter who produces her own tracks on GarageBand, dancer, visual artist and actor who’s also a fan of classic 70s rock…