viruses

Anti-Vaxxed?

By Emily Monosson / On April 18th, 2016
In light of the fuss over Robert Di Niro and the movie Vaxxed; if anyone needs reminding of the value of vaccines, take a look at this diagram of 20th Century Death. These are estimates as they say but even so the numbers are humbling. I won’t go into the story behind the movie and its writer, director and one-time (now unlicensed) doc, that has been covered plenty (instead here is an interesting NYT article about the developer of the measles vaccine, Dr. Maurice Hilleman.

Mosquitoes and Zika Virus: "We Don't Have to Live in Fear"

By Emily Monosson / On February 24th, 2016
Mosquitoes, along with their disease-causing hitchhikers like West Nile, Equine encephalitis, Dengue, and now Zika, are on the move, finding new habitats and naïve populations ripe for infection. Just as Lyme has made tick experts out of us all (no, that one is just a dog tick), we are on a first-name basis with mosquitoes like Aedes and Culex.
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Lessons from the Flu

By Emily Monosson / On November 6th, 2014
As flu season approaches each year, thousands line up to receive a vaccine—but many others don't.
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#ForewordFriday: Plagues! Edition

By Jason Leppig / On February 21st, 2014
This Friday, check out this selection from Mark Jerome Walters' Seven Modern Plagues. Since Walters first drew attention to these “ecodemics” in 2003 with the publication of Six Modern Plagues, much has been learned about how they developed.