I remember the ebola outbreak back in 2014 and how we bizarrely made ourselves believe that was going to become what COVID actually was. I even remember some extremely bizarre paranoid claims Obama himself engineered ebola as revenge for slavery.
Read more here: https://progressive.org/op-eds/cyclosp ... 0260729/(The Progressive) Then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025, I knew my life would become more complicated. I am among the estimated fourteen million Americans under age sixty-five who are considered immunocompromised; an additional fifty-eight million over age sixty-five have immune systems that are naturally slower to respond, making them less effective than they once were.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, protection from infectious disease through herd immunity and the promise of groundbreaking discoveries through mRNA vaccine technology have both crumbled. The hope for autoimmune disease treatments that don’t suppress the immune system has faded, leaving people like me vulnerable to pathogens and infections for the foreseeable future. As the current cyclospora parasite outbreak widens across the country, the threat to the immunosuppressed community has grown.
I’ve been on Ocrevus, a B-cell depleting medication, to treat multiple sclerosis since 2017. Prior to my diagnosis, I spent thirteen years searching for the cause of my severe weakness, fatigue, and involuntary muscle movements. Having seen how my nervous system deteriorated without medication, I recognize the vast improvements that treatment has provided me. Increased strength allows me to walk further and for longer than before.
But treatment for autoimmune disease comes with severe risks, including an increased risk of cancer, severe colon inflammation, and the possibility of life-threatening infections. A virus or bacteria that for most people may pose an inconvenience can be for me a threat to my life.
In July 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scaled back a surveillance program that monitors foodborne illnesses. The national program that tracked food poisoning for three decades was reduced from tracking eight pathogens to only two. Included in this cut was cyclospora, the parasite responsible for the current surge of explosive diarrhea occurring in more than forty states.
Read more here: https://theconversation.com/why-millio ... 6-289667(The Conversation) The World Health Organization estimates that in 2026 nearly 11 million people will contract the virus that causes measles. Most of these cases will occur in Africa and Asia, but many countries in the Americas and Europe are reporting outbreaks affecting hundreds or thousands of people.
There is no treatment for measles, but vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective at preventing the disease. Unvaccinated people who get sick with measles are at risk of serious complications that can lead to deafness, blindness and death. The risk of a bad outcome is higher for people who are undernourished and unable to access supportive medical care.
As an infectious disease epidemiologist, I study the reasons for changes in population health risks around the world. The specific factors leading to measles epidemics vary by country, but the underlying cause everywhere is decreased vaccination rates.
Zero-dose children in low-income countries
The vast majority of parents around the world want to protect their children from preventable infectious diseases through vaccination. In many lower-income countries, the supply of vaccines remains insufficient to meet the demand for them.
Because measles is highly contagious, the vaccination rate needs to be above 95% to protect a community from outbreaks, creating what is known as “herd immunity.” One dose of measles vaccine protects most people from the disease, but two doses are recommended to improve effectiveness.
Read more here: https://grist.org/drought/even-in-drou ... an-boom/(Grist) The world has become hotter and, in many places, drier than ever before in recorded history. Just this summer, as some U.S. states battle over rights to the Colorado River, major reservoirs are at historically-low levels. In Puerto Rico, extended drought has exacerbated an infrastructure crisis, leaving residents to suffer weeks-long stretches without water. In Europe, the Danube and Rhine rivers reached record lows, causing nuclear plants to shut down, devastating crops, and revealing long-lost relics from WWII. More than 60 percent of farmland in Italy is affected by critical drought.
Emerging research shows that a drier world is often a sicker one, too. A new paper, published last week in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, takes stock of nearly 100 scientific studies of diseases found throughout the animal kingdom — from humans to large mammals, fish, amphibians, and insects — to reveal how drought can help deadly infections and parasites spread.
The majority of human parasites and many pathogens need water to thrive. And while cases of some infectious diseases — like schistosomiasis, a dangerous flatworm infection also known as snail fever, and malaria — sometimes fall dramatically when ponds and lakes dry up, others — like cholera, West Nile virus, and dengue — end up booming.
This is called the “drought-disease paradox,” said Tara Stewart Merrill, an aquatic disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and coauthor of the paper. “It’s so counterintuitive,” she said. “We think a water-borne disease should thrive only when there’s plenty of water, but in some cases they thrive when there’s less water.”
She and her collaborator and coauthor, Pieter Johnson, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, became interested in how drought would affect these pathogens several years ago while studying parasites in pond ecosystems in California. Suddenly, Stewart Merrill said, more than half of their study sites dried up.
