“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
After officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) declared on Mar. 11, 2020 that outbreaks of a mutated coronavirus (COVID-19)1 2 had become a global pandemic and urged countries to take strong action to stop its spread,3 4 the governments of countries representing one-third of the world’s population5 closed borders, restricted or halted travel between […]
Story Highlights A soldier was vaccinated for smallpox and developed a local and systemic vaccine virus smallpox infection after tattooing over his injection site. Despite global eradication of wild-type smallpox, fears over its potential use as a biological weapon have prompted vaccination of military personnel and first responders. Similar processes for administration of the smallpox […]
Responding to the coronavirus outbreak in China, where tens of thousands of citizens suspected of being infected with coronavirus (COVID-2019) have been detained and involuntarily taken to quarantine camps,1 on Feb. 1, 2020 an executive order was issued by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, directing the U.S. Northern […]
A novel strain of a coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019 and, by the middle of January, thousands of Chinese citizens were sick. According to Johns Hopkins University Center for Science and Engineering, as of Jan. 30, 2020 there were 217 deaths among 9,776 confirmed coronavirus […]
Little Women, the 19th century coming of age movie directed by Greta Gerwig currently showing in theaters nationwide, has moviegoers searching for information about scarlet fever. Beth, the youngest of the four March sisters, dies of complications of the infection at the climax of the movie. Scarlet fever is a bacterial infection caused by the […]
Alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the delayed, potentially fatal red meat allergy acquired through tick bites, has increased dramatically in the United States, and cases have also been reported in Sweden, Germany and Australia.1 As of 2013, more than 5,000 people in the Southwest U.S. have been diagnosed with the condition.2 In 2007, Scott Commins, MD, an […]
Harvard Medical School graduate and pediatric oncologist Stephanie Taylor, MD once took care of children with cancer at a teaching hospital. She wondered why many of her young patients contracted infections, such as influenza, despite the hospital’s heavy emphasis on prevention. Taylor began to suspect increased susceptibility to contracting infections might have something to do […]
On Dec. 5, 2019, the Samoan government reportedly arrested a “vocal antivaccination campaigner” and charged him with “incitement” as the government widens a mass measles vaccination campaign in the small South Pacific island nation of about 200,000 people. More than 4,300 measles cases with 63 deaths have been reported since the measles outbreak began in […]
Story Highlights The elimination of religious exemptions to vaccination in some states like New York are forcing parents to make the untenable choice between violating their deeply held religious or spiritual beliefs or uprooting their lives and either homeschooling their children or moving to another state. With the focus on a number of measles cases […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned on May 30, 2019 that, if the current measles outbreak continues, the U.S. could lose its measles elimination status that has been in effect since 2000. According to the agency: “If these outbreaks continue through summer and fall, the United States may lose its measles elimination […]