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...
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...
This is decidedly unsettling: “Windborne long-distance migration of malaria mosquitoes in the Sahel”.
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...
Jennifer Frazer writes on the Scientific American blog site: “The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer’s Grows”.
A news story by Michael Price in Science: “Sleeping sickness hides in human skin”.
Donald McNeil, Jr., reports in the New York Times on the impending spread of Zika virus into Puerto Rico:
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 paper: Bos, K. I., Harkins, K. M., Herbig, A., Coscolla, M., Weber, N., Comas, I., … & Krause, J. (2014). Pre-Columbian mycobacterial genomes rev...
The advent of metagenomic analysis of microbial communities has led to some unexpected insights about human biology. These techniques have quietly been leadi...
Mo Costandi describes a paper with a really fascinating finding about the workings of leprosy: “Leprosy spreads by reprogramming nerve cells into migratory s...
Molecular archaeologist Christina Warinner gave a TED talk and the main ideas are now in a CNN article: “Why your dental plaque is valuable”.
Notable, from the Guardian: “Malaria kills twice as many people as previously thought, research finds”.
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...
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 ...
The NYT reports that Nigeria has been free of guinea worm infections for a year.
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...