Nature reports: Three years into the pandemic, the immune systems of the vast majority of humans have learnt to recognize SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination, infection or, in many cases, both. But just how quickly do these types of immunity fade? New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19,… Read More »
The New York Times reports: In 2016, a blockbuster drug called Humira was poised to become a lot less valuable. The key patent on the best-selling anti-inflammatory medication, used to treat conditions like arthritis, was expiring at the end of the year. Regulators had blessed a rival version of the drug, and more copycats were… Read More »
Nature reports: The emergence of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is often attributed to the overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock. But researchers have homed in on another potential driver of resistance: antidepressants. By studying bacteria grown in the laboratory, a team has now tracked how antidepressants can trigger drug resistance1. “Even… Read More »
Nature reports: Most studies on how humans acquire their microbiomes have focused on people’s first contact with microbes: through their mums. “It’s key to providing a microbial starter kit,” says Hilary Browne, a microbiologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK. To examine how and why this starter kit changes over a person’s life,… Read More »
Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren write: Your gut is a bustling and thriving alien colony. They number in their trillions and include thousands of different species. Many of these microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya, were here long before humans, have evolved alongside us and now outnumber our own cells many times over. Indeed, as… Read More »
Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: A mother gives her baby her all: love, hugs, kisses … and a sturdy army of bacteria. These simple cells, which journey from mother to baby at birth and in the months of intimate contact that follow, form the first seeds of the child’s microbiome—the evolving community of symbiotic microorganisms tied to… Read More »
Katherine J. Wu writes: After months and months of SARS-CoV-2 subvariant soup, one ingredient has emerged in the United States with a flavor pungent enough to overwhelm the rest: XBB.1.5, an Omicron offshoot that now accounts for an estimated 75 percent of cases in the Northeast. A crafty dodger of antibodies that is able to… Read More »
Science reports: Most scientists believe China’s decision to end its zero-COVID policy was long overdue. But now they have a new worry: that the country is collecting and sharing far too little data about the rough transition to a new coexistence with the virus. China abruptly dropped virtually all controls a month ago, after protests,… Read More »
The New York Times reports: When Ebola swept through the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018, it was a struggle to track cases. Dr. Billy Yumaine, a public health official, recalls steady flows of people moving back and forth across the border with Uganda while others hid sick family members in their homes because… Read More »
The New York Times reports: Slumped in wheelchairs and lying on gurneys, the sickened patients crowd every nook and cranny of the emergency department at the hospital in northern China. They cram into the narrow spaces between elevator doors. They surround an idle walk-through metal detector. And they line the walls of a corridor ringing… Read More »
CNN reports: Almost 250 million people in China may have caught Covid-19 in the first 20 days of December, according to an internal estimate from the nation’s top health officials, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times reported Friday. If correct, the estimate – which CNN cannot independently confirm – would account for roughly 18% of… Read More »
The Wall Street Journal reports: Covid-19’s rapid spread in China has prompted reports of crowded hospitals and inundated crematoria. It could also help answer whether Omicron is truly a milder version of the virus. Iterations of the Omicron variant are spreading rapidly in China after officials relaxed zero-Covid controls in place for most of the… Read More »
CNN reports: China’s abrupt and under-prepared exit from zero-Covid could lead to nearly 1 million deaths, according to a new study, as the country braces for an unprecedented wave of infections spreading out from its biggest cities to its vast rural areas. For nearly three years, the Chinese government has used strict lockdowns, centralized quarantines,… Read More »
Maxime Polleri writes: As a farmer, Atsuo Tanizaki did not care much for the state’s maps of radioactive contamination. Colour-coded zoning restrictions might make sense for government workers, he told me, but ‘real’ people did not experience their environment through shades of red, orange and green. Instead, they navigated the landscape one field, one tree,… Read More »
Herman Pontzer writes: We’re often told our metabolism speeds up at puberty and slows down in middle age, particularly with menopause, and that men have faster metabolisms than women. None of these claims is based on real science. My colleagues and I have begun to fill that gap in scientific understanding. In 2014 John Speakman,… Read More »
Science reports: When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’… Read More »