Tag Archives: Viruses

Public health officials in Los Angeles County have declared an outbreak of hepatitis A, a highly contagious liver infection driven by a virus that can, in rare cases, cause severe illness. The condition, which is typically identified in fewer than 50 people in L.A. County each year, infected at least 138 people in 2024 and cases have remained unusually high …

In the early 2000s, a coronavirus infecting bats jumped into raccoon dogs and other wild mammals in southwestern China. Some of those animals were sold in markets, where the coronavirus jumped again, into humans. The result was the SARS pandemic, which spread to 33 countries and claimed 774 lives. A few months into it, scientists discovered the coronavirus in mammals …

The campaign to curb bird flu on the nation’s farms has been slowed by the chaotic transition to a new administration that is determined to cut costs, reduce the federal work force and limit communications, according to interviews with more than a dozen scientists and federal officials. On poultry farms, more than 168 million birds have been killed in an …

As the Trump administration moves to dismantle international public health safeguards, pull funding from local health departments and legitimize health misinformation, some experts now fear that the country is setting the stage for a long-term measles resurgence. If federal health officials do not change course, large multistate outbreaks like the one that has torn through West Texas, jumping to neighboring …

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has an unorthodox idea for tackling the bird flu bedeviling U.S. poultry farms. Let the virus rip. Instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that …

Until 2020, few Americans needed to think about how viruses spread or how the human immune system works. The pandemic offered a painful crash course. Sometimes, it seemed that the science was evolving as quickly the virus itself. So The New York Times asked experts to revisit the nightmare. Of the most significant public health measures introduced during Covid, which …

A raging measles outbreak in West Texas, which has so far killed one child, has not abated and may have taken root in New Mexico, state health officials reported on Friday. The outbreak has sickened nearly 200 people — roughly 40 more cases than were reported on Tuesday — and has left 23 hospitalized in West Texas. Local health officials …

An unidentified illness has killed scores of people and infected hundreds in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the World Health Organization has reported, with preliminary investigations tracing the outbreak to three children who in January ate a bat and died. Fifty-three people in the country’s northwest had died from the disease, out of 431 reported cases as of Feb. 15, …

Two dairy workers in Michigan may have transmitted bird flu to their pet cats last May, suggests a new study published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In one household, infected cats may also have passed the virus to other people in the home, but limited evidence makes it difficult to ascertain the possibility. The results …

The viruses we know best are the ones that make us sick — the influenza viruses that send us to bed and the smallpox viruses that may send us to the grave. But healthy people are rife with viruses that don’t make us ill. Scientists estimate that tens of trillions of viruses live inside of us, though they’ve identified just …