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...
The main problem facing a parasite over the long term, Burnet noted, is the issue of transmission: how to spread its offspring from one individual host to another. Various methods and traits have deve...
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...
The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.
The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.
Their result was a model-generated prediction: Given this rate of transmission, given that rate of recovery, given those unrelated mortalities, then . . . an intermediate grade of virulence should com...
Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.
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.
Know that walking into a small woodlot, he wrote, is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.
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...
Sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych
Acarologists (tick biologists)
But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.
For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More pat...
Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of mur...
In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.
No convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
Numbers can be an important aspect of understanding infectious disease. Take measles. At first glance, it might seem nonmathematical. It’s caused by a paramyxovirus
One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were euthanized as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten empl...
One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infect...
Showing 41 to 60 of 114 results