Disease Surveillance

Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania had Marburg outbreaks in January and March of this year, respectively. As a hemorrhagic fever, Marburg is a relatively rare disease with a very high death rate. Like Ebola, it is transmitted through bodily fluids and symptoms include high fever and capillary leakage.…

Even with current improvements and updated vaccinations in the latter part of the pandemic, it still poses significant dangers for older Americans. Statistics show that nearly 3/4th of COVID-19 deaths have occurred in people over the age of 65, with the highest casualty among people over the age of…

Ebola is a severe, often fatal illness affecting humans, but there are limited licensed therapeutics and vaccines available. In January 2023, the Ministry of Health of Uganda declared the end of the Ebola disease, 42 days after the last confirmed case tested negative. The outbreak was declared in…

With China’s latest coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization tries to push Beijing to share data. As opposed to early 2020 when Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised China’s “transparency,” there had been deliberate undercounted cases. Despite the increased contagion and travel increase,…

Low rates of Polio vaccination in young children are alarming New York State health officials, who worry about the disease resurging in modern America. The variant that is currently circulating has the ability to cause paralysis in many unvaccinated people. However, due to vaccine fatigue and…

The FDA approved Omicron-specific vaccines recommended for everyone ages 12 and up with a minimum of two doses of the original vaccine. However, with the public’s unfamiliarity with the vaccine, there have been a series of concerns about the effectiveness of these new vaccines. Along with the…

In China’s Shandong and Henan provinces, Chinese scientists have announced 35 infected cases of the new Langya henipavirus. With symptoms found in both humans and animals, this pathogen causes fever, cough, and fatigue – possibly related to the early days of COVID-19. However, there are no reports…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends contact tracing in the U.S. states and states that tracing should be focused primarily in high-risk settings. Since the beginning of the pandemic, cities and states have faced challenges detecting the virus and obtaining results…

President Biden plans to establish a “Mission Control” office that would coordinate government agencies to forecast and spot pandemics in the future. The pandemic preparedness plan includes five goals:  1. expand the nation’s arsenal of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics 2. improve…

A coalition of health and tech companies have formed VCI, which stands for Vaccination Credential Initiative, in order to develop encrypted digital copies of immunization records that can be stored in digital wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. For those who do not own smartphones, VCI plans…

Setbacks caused by COVID-19 have slowed progress in prevention and treatment of tuberculosis in several countries. For example, tuberculosis case notifications have dropped 25-30% in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The UN Secretary General has issued 10 priority actions to close the gap in…

While COVID-19 has just reached the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC), another viral outbreak has already killed over 6,500 children: measles. Beginning in October 2018, cases began to spike and an epidemiologist from the WHO reports that the situation has “mushroomed.” She remarks that it may be…

Sam Gambhir, who holds the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professorship for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research, has recently revealed his designs for a ‘smart toilet’ which will be able detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine including several cancers such as colorectal or urologic…

Google has been collecting data about people's location throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and the company now states it plans to public release the data in "Community Motility Reports" to better inform public health officials. The data will be organized by country then region, and show traffic…