Problem peaked in 1952 with an outbreak that killed more than three thousand victims, many of them children, and left twenty-one thousand at least partially paralyzed. Soon afterward, vaccines develop...
The good news about Reston virus, derived both from the 1989 US scare and from retrospective research on Luzon, is that it doesn’t seem to cause illness in humans, only in monkeys. The bad news is tha...
Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial.
بعد أسبوع من موت آني ابنة داروين بينماالصورة لا تزال حاضرة في الذاكرة، كتب داروين مذكرة خاصة قصيرة تسجل القليل من مفاتنها، وعاداتها، وسماتها، ورقصاتها حوله بطول الممشى الرملي، وتدقيقها صعب الإرضاء، و...
Eighty traps seemed like a lot when we started walking. But at the end of two hours, Gordon and Tom and I haven’t collected a single snake. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe the snake population, here in...
The result will be gradual transmutation of heritable forms, and adaptation to circumstances, by a process of selective culling. Eventually he gave the crank a name: natural selection. Twenty years pa...
A few monkeys and parrots were loose on the wreck, clambering hysterically toward nowhere. He saw several animals disappear into the flames.
RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they’re limited to small genomes. In fact, there’s a fancy name for that...
Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthrou...
Then there was a new epidemic—of fear, said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the...
Not only are islands impoverished relative to the mainlands, but small islands are more severely impoverished than large ones. That bit of insight became famed as the species-area relationship.
The order Chiroptera (the hand-wing creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a b...
Now here’s the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance o...
A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but they don’t explode, and they don’t melt. In fact, he said, the conventional term then in use, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, was itself a misnomer, because...
Sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych
Not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976, with Karl Johnson again prominently involved), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), H...
Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.
Know that walking into a small woodlot, he wrote, is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.
What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.
The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus o...
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