Recognizing leprosy in wild chimpanzees
A story in Science has been making the rounds on my feeds about a newly-recognized problem in chimpanzee populations: “Leprosy, ancient scourge of humans, fo...
All posts tagged with pathogens
Anopheles mosquitoes disperse over long distances by wind
This is decidedly unsettling: “Windborne long-distance migration of malaria mosquitoes in the Sahel”.
Zebra stripes and flies
A fun story by Ed Yong in The Atlantic looks at an experiment that put horses in zebra suits to test whether the stripes confound biting flies: “The Surprisi...
Link: Transmissible Alzheimer’s Disease?
Jennifer Frazer writes on the Scientific American blog site: “The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer’s Grows”.
Link: Sleeping sickness hides in human skin
A news story by Michael Price in Science: “Sleeping sickness hides in human skin”.
Link: Zika virus set to infect up to a fourth of Puerto Ricans
Donald McNeil, Jr., reports in the New York Times on the impending spread of Zika virus into Puerto Rico:
Notable: Tuberculosis strains in seventeenth-century Hungary
Notable paper: Kay, G. L. et al. (2015) Eighteenth-century genomes show that mixed infections were common at time of peak tuberculosis in Europe. Nat. Commun...
Notable: New World tuberculosis came from seals
Notable paper: Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., … & Krause, J. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes rev...
Coprolite microbial ecology
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
The workings of leprosy
Mo Costandi describes a paper with a really fascinating finding about the workings of leprosy: “Leprosy spreads by reprogramming nerve cells into migratory s...
Calculus microbially
Molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner gave a TED talk and the main ideas are now in a CNN article: “Why your dental plaque is valuable”.
Malaria death toll estimate rises
Notable, from the Guardian: “Malaria kills twice as many people as previously thought, research finds”.
Malaria book
A new book by Sonia Shah covers the history of malaria and the way it affects people today around the world: The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 5...
Fatigued by advocates impeding research
Science has a news article that details the conflict over publishing new research on a viral cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS): “Conflicting Papers on ...
Dracunculiasis
The NYT reports that Nigeria has been free of guinea worm infections for a year.
Leprosy evolution in humans
Where did leprosy come from as a human pathogen, and how did it spread through the world? Two years ago, this new research would have merited a whole book. N...