At first glance, it looks like an unassuming farm. Cows are scattered across fenced-in fields. A milking barn sits in the distance with a tractor parked alongside. But the people who work there are not farmers, and other buildings look more like what you’d find at a modern university than in a cow pasture. Welcome...
Four Massachusetts towns — Douglas, Oxford, Sutton and Webster — have enacted a voluntary evening lockdown in an attempt to curb the spread of a potentially deadly mosquito-borne disease. The decision comes after the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) confirmed the first human case of Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) since 2020 in Worcester County....
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved updated COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer for the 2024-2025 season. The updated mRNA vaccines, Comirnaty and Spikevax, were fully approved for people 12 years and older, while the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine were granted emergency authorization for children 6 months through 11...
A respiratory disease known as parvovirus B19 is on the rise in the U.S. among all age groups, according to a recent advisory from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC issued the health alert on Aug. 13 after European public health authorities reported “unusually” high numbers of cases in 14...
Mpox (formerly monkeypox) has officially been declared a public health emergency by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The African agency reported an increase in the disease throughout the continent and warned that the virus could spread across international borders, The Associated Press reported. More than 96% of all mpox cases and...
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared this week that the increasing spread of mpox across the continent is a health emergency, warning the virus might ultimately spill across international borders. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization is convening its own expert meeting to consider making a similar emergency declaration over mpox. The...
Cases of the Oropouche virus (OROV) emerging in Europe have health officials on high alert. As of the end of July, 19 cases had been reported with 12 in Spain, five in Italy and two in Germany, per the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The disease is typically spread through bites from mosquitoes...
A woman in Dallas County, Texas, has died after being diagnosed with West Nile virus. The patient, whose name and age were not released, contracted a severe neuroinvasive form of the disease, according to a Tuesday press release from the Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS). The female patient had “underlying health issues,” officials...
The head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday he will convene an expert group to determine if the increasing spread of the mpox virus in Africa warrants being declared a global emergency. At a press briefing in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that given the increasing spread of mpox cases beyond Congo,...
The United States’ rate of measles infections in 2024 is more than triple that of 2023, despite almost half the year still remaining. There have been 188 reported cases of measles in the U.S. this year, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated on Thursday. It’s a significant increase from...
