Physicians like me are learning about Zika along with our patients. This takes a dose of humility on our part and an understanding from our patients that we learn something new every single day.
Worldwide, around 30 million people enter and leave prison each year. Of these people, around 4.5 million have hepatitis C, almost 1 million have HIV and 1.5 million have hepatitis B infections.
The world’s scientific community is focused on how to improve detection and responses to emerging diseases such as Zika virus and Ebola. So what can we learn from the most recent large-scale outbreaks?
Models based on where the mosquitoes that transmit Zika are found and human travel patterns to and from infected areas are key to predicting where the virus will spread.
Zika was discovered almost 70 years ago, but wasn’t associated with outbreaks until 2007. So how did this formerly obscure virus wind up causing so much trouble in Brazil?
Missing links make a good story, but not good science. Outdated metaphors don’t help us understand the rapid evolution of infectious diseases such as flu and malaria.
A year ago, Dr Kent Brantly became the first person treated for Ebola in the US. The director of Emory University’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit looks back at we have – and haven’t – learned.
Predicting infectious disease outbreaks is a tricky task to begin with. And it’s made harder still by the fact that any individual outcome is subject to unpredictable – or stochastic – effects.
Ebola has been blamed for a surge in untreated malaria cases in west Africa that could have led to an excess numbers of deaths from malaria, greater than the total caused by the Ebola virus.
Rupert Brooke was commissioned in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a Sub-Lieutenant. Without seeing combat, he died aboard a French hospital ship, from a mosquito bite that turned septic.
During World War II the US military forged partnerships with industry and academia that translated laboratory findings into working products at an unprecedented pace.
Advice that you have to finish the whole course of antibiotics reflects long-standing convention or the drug manufacturer’s decision during an initial trial, rather than scientific evidence.