Dengue fever is nasty. Transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, dengue infects an estimated 220 million people a year — 2 million of whom develop a severe form called dengue haemorrhagic fever, which has no known …
infectious disease
Why Health Authorities Are So Worried About Europe’s Mutant E. Coli Outbreak
Health officials were worried enough about an unusually virulent outbreak of food-borne illness from the E. coli bacteria, which has infected more than 1,500 people in Germany and killed at least 17. But the concern jumped to …
5 Reasons Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health
Climate change is what the people at the Pentagon like to call a “threat multiplier.” Warming takes existing dangers like political instability in developing nations, and amplifies them in ways that can be hard to predict — but which are rarely positive. That goes for human health too.
Q&A: Can We Protect Ourselves from the ‘Superbug’ MRSA?
You’re going to want to wash your hands after you read this post. Author Maryn McKenna, or “Scary Disease Girl,” as she’s known to her colleagues, talks about MRSA — a potentially lethal bug that has jumped from hospitals into …
Wildlife: Protecting Biodiversity Might Just Protect Us From Disease
Over on Ecocentric (home for all your green and green-related needs), I have a post on a neat new study in Nature that makes the case that dwindling animal and plant biodiversity can actually increase the risk of infectious …
Global Microbe Detectives Are Getting Better at Tracking Disease Outbreaks
I was lucky — or unlucky — enough to have a front-row seat for one of the most surprising and frightening infectious disease outbreaks in recent history.
California’s Whooping Cough Epidemic Hits Latino Babies Hardest
An old disease, pertussis or whooping cough, reemerged this summer in California and crept into the Pacific Northwest. At least one infectious disease expert explained the epidemic by calling the region the “epicenter of vaccine …
Can Catching a Cold Make You Fat?
Catching a cold is almost a rite of passage for the chilly winter months when people and viruses are often in close quarters. And that’s especially true among children, who aren’t stingy about what they share among friends …