Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising aga...
Advisory: If your husband catches an ebolavirus, give him food and water and love and maybe prayers but keep your distance, wait patiently, hope for the best-- and, if he dies, don't clean out his bow...
Without explaining what’s on my mind, I ask Nafus and Schreiner: Have they seen any recent invasions by exotic arthropods, or any dramatic population outbreaks among native ones? I inquire about arthr...
Viruses face four basic challenges: how to get from one host to another, how to penetrate a cell within that host, how to commandeer the cell’s equipment and resources for producing multiple copies of...
R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemi...
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...
No convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is (1) extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality though a relatively low number of cases, and yet (2) poorly transmissible...
Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, f...
Each outbreak, by this view, represents a local event primarily explicable by a larger cause—the arrival of the wave. The main proponent of the wave idea is Peter D. Walsh, an American ecologist who h...
Increases of the infectivity rate may lead to large epidemics. This quiet warning has echoed loudly ever since. It’s a cardinal truth, over which public health officials obsess each year during influe...
Equatorial Africa? Could it have arrived there in one soaring leap, leaving no traces in between? From southwestern Sudan to Manila is almost seven thousand miles as the bat flies. But no bat can fly...
Convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on...
The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants an...
RNA viruses because I already had that list in my mind: Hendra and Nipah, Ebola and Marburg, West Nile, Machupo, Junin, the influenzas, the hantas, dengue and yellow fever, rabies and its cousins, chi...
Penicillin works by preventing bacteria from building their cell walls. So do its synthetic alternatives, such as amoxicillin. Tetracycline works by interfering with the internal metabolic processes b...
Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.
Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the ide...
Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya,...