Disease Surveillance

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…

Despite projections of 1 to 1.5 million tests to be performed this week from Vice President Mike Pence and Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the FDA, the number of actual tests performed in the U.S. is much lower. The Atlantic was only able to verify that less than 1,900 people have received…

On Tuesday, March 2nd, the last patient to be diagnosed with Ebola was discharged from a treatment center in Beni, North-Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This may be the last case of Ebola and may mark the end of the outbreak, but the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends waiting…

The Xinjia Hotel in Quanzhou, China that was be used to quarantine people that tested positive for COVID-19 or had come in contact with people who had the virus, has collapsed. 70 people got trapped as the hotel caved in on itself, and an estimated 38 people have been rescued. Families of the…

Even though the number of known cases of the coronavirus are few in the United States, public health officials are worried about the risks and challenges of an outbreak that could occur in homeless populations. Lack of ability to have proper hygiene, living in close proximity, and risk factors from…

COVID-19 is more contagious but less deadly than SARS. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is between 1-2% versus 9.6% for SARS. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has spread much faster and infected over 75,000 people in 2 months compared to SARS, which took 8 months to affect over 8,000. Nonetheless, the two…