About 18 years ago, while delivering a talk at a CDC conference, Gregory Poland punked 2,000 of his fellow scientists. Ten minutes into his lecture, a member of the audience, under Poland’s instruction, raced up to the podium with a slip of paper. Poland skimmed the note and looked up, stony-faced. “Colleagues, I am unsure of what to say,” he said. “We have just been notified of a virus that’s been detected in the U.S. that will take somewhere between
Britain’s daily Covid figures fell for the fourth day in a row today as Boris Johnson faced renewed calls to get the country back to normal amid signs that the Omicron variant is less severe than previous incarnations.
Department of Health bosses reported a further 141,472 cases today, a 6.7 per cent decrease from the 151,663 cases that were reported last Sunday
However the number of people dying with the virus saw a 32.9 per cent rise, with 97 deaths
Neighbours of the UK’s bird flu ‘patient zero’ today claimed his house was ‘full of duck droppings’ after he shared the property for years with around 20 of his feathered friends.
Heartbroken grandfather Alan Gosling, 79, says he is ‘very lonely’ in self-isolation at his home in Buckfastleigh, Devon, after his beloved birds were culled.
The retired train driver is believed to have caught the potentially deadly H5N1 strain from the Mandarin ducks he adopted in his waterside home.
He
Omicron could be even less deadly than flu, scientists believe in a boost to hopes that the worst of the pandemic is over.
Some experts have always maintained that the coronavirus would eventually morph into a seasonal cold-like virus as the world develops immunity through vaccines and natural infection. But the emergence of the highly-mutated Omicron variant appears to have sped the process up.
MailOnline analysis shows Covid killed one in 33 people who tested positive at the peak of
Surging Covid-19 cases are a potential disaster facing the NHS this winter, but there’s another that health chiefs have been braced for since summer.
Flu, the respiratory virus that in a normal winter hospitalises about 400 Britons a week, was expected to push the NHS to breaking point with Covid still around.
That fear was stoked in July after a report by the Academy of Medical Sciences warned that up to 60,000 people may die from flu this year –
In late February 2020, only a couple of weeks after the pandemic coronavirus disease had even received a formal name, a man with a terrible cough and fever showed up at one of the ProHealth Urgent Care centers in Queens, New York. At that point, no COVID-19 cases had yet been confirmed in New York City, but numbers were on the rise in spots across the country, and the man had recently been at a conference.
An ER-trained physician donned
As the world grapples with Covid-19, influenza isn’t getting much attention these days. But the flu’s global impact is staggering: three million to five million cases of severe illness every year, and up to 650,000 deaths. Every few decades, a new flu strain spills over from animals and leads to a pandemic.
The deadly toll of influenza is all the more striking when you consider that we have had vaccines to fight it for eight decades. But they remain mediocre.
