As flu season settles in on College Hill, sniffles can be heard in every lecture hall. In students’ curiosity as to how they can stay healthy, they may turn to an age-old adage: an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
The World Health Organisation has said it doesn’t know how a lab worker in Siberia died, and she urged Russia to provide more information about a case that prompted global concerns about suspected pneumonic plague.
A 28-year-old worker at a research laboratory in Siberia recently died of pneumonia. The facility studies plague, among other pathogens, raising fears that she had been exposed at the laboratory.
In 2024, poliovirus was detected in Gaza's wastewater before a paralytic case was confirmed, and the World Health Organization (WHO) found continued environmental circulation into the following year. By the end of 2025, however, no further detections had been reported, suggesting that a targeted vaccination campaign during a brief ceasefire may have interrupted transmission. The episode shows why epidemic intelligence in damaged urban environments cannot depend on clinics alone: wastewater and other environmental signals can reveal transmission when routine care and reporting have been disrupted. Damage to health facilities and water and sanitation systems further weakens the capacity to prevent, detect, and contain outbreaks.
Florida's former surgeon general, Dr. Scott Rivkees, warned of "great harm to children" if the state Department of Health moves forward with its proposal to eliminate rules that require four vaccines for young children in daycare and schools.
A laboratory worker in a plague research institute in Siberia died last week after developing pneumonia. Since then, local reports suggesting that she broke a test tube containing plague bacteria have fueled speculation about how she became ill. Russian authorities disputed that account and told the World Health Organization (WHO) that plague had not been detected in her tests nor in those of her close contacts.
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The Trump administration is struggling to get clear answers about the death of a Russian laboratory worker at an institute dedicated to studying the plague and has formally escalated its request for information from the country, amid days of stonewalling from Russian officials about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the episode.
The reported death of a 28-year-old laboratory technician in eastern Siberia has triggered regional quarantines and international attention over fears of the cause of death and a lack of transparency.
According to local media reports, Darya Shipilova, a technician employed at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died on Oct. 2 at a regional hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov. She had been diagnosed with pneumonia of “unknown” origin, according to Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s public health agency.
What diseases are spreading right now? Are we even tracking diseases anymore? Should I be worried about measles? Should I bother getting my flu and COVID vaccines? We dive in and answer ALL those questions on this week's episode of the pod
We go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the site of the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in history. Health authorities believe the outbreak first began in January but was not detected until May, in part due to cuts in global health investments, like the dismantling of USAID. Since then, over 8,000 cases have been recorded, with more than 4,000 fatalities so far.
A woman’s death last week near a Russian facility studying the plague immediately put the world on alert. This is the plague, after all, responsible for the deaths of some half of the humans in Europe during the worst outbreak in the 1300s. And it happened in Russia, a country with a long history of bioweapon experimentation.