UK health authorities will offer children under 10 living in London an additional dose of polio vaccine amid rising concern about a comeback of the disease. While nobody has tested positive for infection with the type of polio virus that can cause paralysis, authorities have nonetheless found it in several London sewage samples recently. This […]
On August 9, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for a new way of administering the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine. The move allows doctors to give patients smaller doses in order to get more shots out of each vial and protect more people quickly. It’s the latest step in the […]
7/29/2022|5:30 Abbot’s Pandemic Defense Coalition is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientists around the world together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world, searching for mutations, and so far they managed to alert the world to several that have swept the […]
Monkeypox, which federal officials declared a public health emergency on August 4, is not as contagious as the other ongoing public health emergency in the U.S.: COVID-19. Monkeypox primarily spreads through contact with infected skin lesions. Theoretically, containing monkeypox should therefore be more feasible, as long as testing, vaccines, and treatments are accessible. But in […]
Scrolling through social media these days, you’ll see that loud extremists continue to dominate COVID-19 discourse. At one pole are the denialists who argue—incorrectly—that COVID is “just a cold.” At the other are those who suggest that no meaningful progress has been made in controlling its devastation. The truth, of course, is somewhere in the […]
Born and raised in the Nigerian port city of Calabar, Abasi Ene-Obong remembers the exact moment that changed his life’s direction. Sitting in an introductory genetics class at medical school, in 2003, he heard the professor say that African genetic samples comprised less than 3% of health data bases in the world, creating a stunning […]
Scientists and activists have deployed many tactics to help combat climate change: expanding technologies like wind and solar power, building better batteries to store that renewable energy, and protecting forests, all the while striving to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On Aug. 4, during the American Psychological Association’s Convention in Minneapolis, nearly a dozen experts turned […]
ALBANY, N.Y. — New York state health officials issued a more urgent call Thursday for unvaccinated children and adults to get inoculated against polio, citing new evidence of possible “community spread” of the dangerous virus. The polio virus has now been found in seven different wastewater samples in two adjacent counties north of New York […]
Getting kids to be active in a modern world is a tough sell. It can be hard to compete with indoor comforts like video games, television, and air conditioning. Sweltering weather is another formidable barrier to kids getting enough physical activity, finds a new scientific review published in the journal Temperature that analyzed more than […]
On August 4, the U.S. federal government declared monkeypox—with more than 6,600 cases in the country—a public health emergency. Monkeypox is now the second simultaneous public health emergency in the U.S.; the other is COVID-19. The emergency status allows the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, more discretion in accessing additional funds and […]
