Tag: pandemics

A new road map shows how to prevent pandemics

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Want to limit the transfer of viruses between animals and humans? A new report gives examples of how to do that by keeping ecosystems intact.

The pandemic prevention road map, published March 26 in Nature Communications, recommends protecting or restoring places where animals forage and rest, and minimizing human-wildlife encounters in more developed areas.

Most outbreaks of previously unknown infectious diseases, like COVID-19 or HIV, are caused when a virus jumps from an animal to a human. That jumping

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WHO do you think you are? MPs fear ‘unelected’ UN officials could dictate Britain’s lockdown policy in future pandemics under controversial new treaty

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World Health Organization (WHO) chiefs could be given power over Britain’s future pandemic policies, MPs fear.

Under plans for a new global pandemic treaty, the UN agency is considering making dozens of amendments to its legally-binding rulebook. 

Critics worry member nations might be made to comply with advice in future health crises, such as enforcing lockdowns or vaccine passports.

A group of Conservative MPs have now warned the UK risks ‘signing away’ its powers to ‘unelected’ WHO bosses, complaining about

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What COVID Revealed About American Psychiatry

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Meanwhile, the institute shed some of its original congressional mandate for treatment and prevention, by giving the job of funding mental-health services to a new federal entity, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. From then on, as one former N.I.M.H. director told me, undertreatment and homelessness were SAMHSA’s responsibilities. As the Human Genome Project launched, and brain-scanning technology leapt forward thanks to functional MRI, pressure to find genetic and brain signatures for psychiatric illnesses grew. Yet, as

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The Case for Wearing Masks Forever

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Last December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it was shortening the recommended isolation period for those with COVID-19 to five days. Getting exposed to the virus no longer meant that people needed to quarantine, either, as long as they were fully vaccinated and wore a mask. It was a big moment, and it occurred just as the Omicron variant was surging. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School,

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Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Ever End?

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Twenty-seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic, our defenses against the coronavirus seem at once stronger and more penetrable than ever. A growing majority of the U.S. population now has some immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, whether from vaccination, past infection, or both. However, staggeringly infectious members of the Omicron family have demonstrated an ability to evade some of those protections. Since April, they have led to a quadrupling of daily coronavirus cases; the U.S.

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How COVID Exploded in Hong Kong

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At the beginning of 2022, Hong Kong stood out as a pandemic success story—proof that the so-called Zero COVID approach, whatever its costs, could squash the virus’s medical toll. Less than one per cent of the population had been infected, and the city had recorded around two hundred COVID deaths across a population of nearly seven and a half million people. Then Omicron and its more contagious cousin, B.A.2, arrived. Since then, more than three million people are thought to

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Covid China: Staff at Wuhan lab admit ‘devastating pandemics can occur’ if viruses escape

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Staff at the Chinese laboratory central to questions about the origins of the coronavirus crisis have admitted ‘devastating pandemics can occur’ at facilities housing dangerous viruses. 

In a 2,000-word article published in a scientific journal, two professors at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)  laid out a series of recommendations to avoid spillovers — despite fears that Covid leaked from their own facility.

The journal entry, described as ‘beyond satire’, advocates for ‘sharing and transparency’ between global biolabs and promotes

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A Pandemic Tragedy in Guayaquil

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The problem with any story, big or small, is that you’re always starting in the middle. All beginnings are constructions we use to make sense of what is mostly incomprehensible. Of course, there are facts. For example: during one particularly violent twenty-four-hour period in January, eighteen people were murdered in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and its commercial and industrial capital.

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The CDC Shifted the Pandemic’s Burden to the Vulnerable

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This time last week, nearly all Americans were still being urged by the nation’s leadership to please, keep those darn masks on. Then the Great American Unmasking Part Deux began. On Friday, the CDC debuted a new set of COVID-19 guidelines that green-lit roughly 70 percent of us—effectively, anyone living in a place where hospitals are not being actively overrun by the coronavirus—to doff our masks in most indoor public settings. The stamina of mask policy had been flagging for

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Beyond the Booster Shot | The New Yorker

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The first tuberculosis vaccine was developed in 1921, by two French scientists, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin. It was called Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or B.C.G., and has long been one of the world’s most widely administered shots. From the beginning, its power was surprising. B.C.G. contains a bacterium similar to the one that causes TB, and engenders an immune defense specific to that disease. But, as Calmette noted in a paper in 1931, those vaccinated with B.C.G. at birth were around

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