Jonathan Lambert
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Snake bites usually arise when there's a conflict between how people and snakes are using an environment where they coexist.
But scientists' knowledge of precisely where snakes and people coexist was patchy.
Researchers analyzed reams of data, from scientific papers to museum records, to create a detailed map of over 500 venomous species.
Right now, overlap between dangerous snakes and people is highest across parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
But the researchers found that climate change could expand that overlap.
Parts of eastern North America, China, Europe, and elsewhere could become more habitable for some venomous snakes, which in turn could mean more snake bites.
The study appears in PLOS-neglected tropical diseases.
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.