Jonathan Lambert
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
In 2022, MPOX was spreading primarily among men who have sex with men.
Since then, the context of outbreaks has changed.
In 2024, for instance, large numbers of children were infected.
That shift may stem from changes in how the virus spreads over time, according to a new paper in Science Advances.
Researchers investigated the recent outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
They found that early cases were driven by sexual contact, sometimes with a few individuals acting as super spreaders.
But later, close non-sexual contact with those initial cases and subsequent ones took over.
Ultimately, that non-sexual transmission can lead to larger outbreaks.
In 1984, President Reagan restricted foreign aid for family planning to organizations that provided or even talked about abortion.
Since then, Democratic presidents have reinstated funding to those organizations, and then Republican ones stop it again.
Previous research has found that restricting aid doesn't reduce abortion rates, but does often force health clinics to close.
That can be deadly for mothers.
New research suggests aid restrictions by Republican presidents are associated with a 10% increase in maternal deaths in countries that rely on foreign aid.
That increase is enough to offset roughly one-fifth of the overall progress the globe has made in reducing maternal deaths.
Antibiotic resistance is on the rise worldwide.
Researchers typically point to human overuse as the main driver, but antibiotics and resistance to antibiotics ultimately trace back to bacteria in the soil, and soils around the world are becoming drier from climate change.
To see if this might impact resistance levels, researchers analyzed soils from around the globe.