Arriving in the isolation ward of a biocontainment hospital is an unsettling, scary experience. In 2014, I spent 19 days in one while being treated for Ebola, watching the news cycle churn around me as my world receded to a small window, a phone, and the handful of providers in protective suits who came into my room every day.
Thrust back into the front line by a deadly hantavirus outbreak, infectious disease experts have to balance informing the public about its potential risks without provoking undue fear of a Covid-scale pandemic.
The deaths of three cruise ship passengers during a rare hantavirus outbreak has sparked international alarm -- and flashbacks to when the world tipped into a pandemic six years ago.
Since the first sign of an outbreak, the reminders have come from government officials, health agencies and plenty of experts: There’s no reason to worry. Don’t panic. It’s under control.
“We have this under control, and we’re not worried about it,” US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a briefing Monday when asked about the hantavirus outbreak that has moved from cruise ship to quarantine.
As more than five million fans around the globe prepare to travel to the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, concerns over disease outbreaks are growing.
Dr. William Goedel, an epidemiologist and affiliate faculty at Brown University’s Pandemic Center, created a map to help keep tabs on the movement of teams and fans as they watch 104 tournament games from the opening match June 11 to the final on July 19.
Passengers from the Hondius cruise ship are being repatriated under a patchwork of measures that reflect uncertainty over how this strain of hantavirus spreads, complicating efforts to contain the deadly outbreak.
Some passengers are being placed in biocontainment units, notably in France, for at least two weeks. Australia plans to quarantine passengers in a purpose-built facility outside Perth. But in the Netherlands, most are being asked to self-isolate for six weeks, with short outdoor walks permitted under masking and distancing rules.
A new report has put Iowa in the lowest tier when it comes to public health emergency preparedness.
The annual Ready or Not report by the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health evaluates each state’s preparedness by looking at indicators like workforce mobility and public health funding. This year, it moved Iowa down from the middle tier to the low tier.
After Trump Admin. slashed federal research funding, cut CDC staffing & purged cruise ship inspectors and port health staff, Brown University pandemic expert says incident: “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now”
NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.
In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government’s top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.
Seventeen Americans who are currently on board the Dutch cruise ship enduring a hantavirus outbreak will make their way back to the United States on a repatriation flight arranged by the Department of State.
In late January 2020, an 80-year-old boarded the Diamond Princess in Yokohama with a cough. It was one of the first major outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 outside China. As the British cruise ship sailed from Yokohama to Hong Kong, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Okinawa and back, the still-new virus spread throughout the vessel.
The Georgia Department of Public Health is continuing to monitor two residents exposed to hantavirus aboard a cruise ship last month. Officials could monitor the couple for up to 45 days, Emory University epidemiologist Jodie Guest said.
Maryland remains better prepared to combat public health emergencies than most other states, but federal shakeups in staffing and funding could threaten those protections, according to a new report from Trust for America’s Health.
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Texas’ ability to respond to public health emergencies like disease outbreaks and natural disasters is at risk because of historic federal funding cuts last year, a report released Thursday, May 7, concluded.
Fewer than half of U.S. states are sufficiently prepared for a health emergency, according to research released Thursday.
Only 20 states scored “high” on the annual report from Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) on national public health emergency preparedness. Seventeen states and Washington, D.C., scored in the “middle tier,” and 13 states fell into the “low tier.”
A cruise ship that left from Argentina on April 1 is currently at the center of an outbreak of hantavirus, a virus that most commonly spreads through rodent droppings and saliva. The virus causes flu-like symptoms and can lead to death.
William Goedel, Brown Faculty Fellow in University History, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health, recounts the history of Brown University’s earliest educational offerings in public health in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside the school’s long-standing partnerships with Rhode Island’s city and state public health agencies. Goedel also offers a vision for a strengthened academic-government partnership to meet the challenges of protecting and promoting the public’s health in the 21st century.
What we learned from South Carolina’s measles outbreak
The recent measles outbreak in South Carolina sickened nearly 1,000 people before public health officials got it under control. Vaccination can effectively prevent further spread
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remake the U.S. vaccination schedule is on hold following a federal judge’s decision last month, but the health secretary is still using his power to affect which shots children in poor countries receive.
The Mississippi Public Health Laboratory is temporarily outsourcing some services to neighboring states after building repairs forced the facility to pause roughly a third of the tests it performs, including those for HIV, flu, COVID-19, whooping cough and measles.
The COVID pandemic overwhelmed our health care system and killed well over a million Americans. Fast-tracked vaccines saved millions, but missteps in the response and misinformation online have damaged trust. Horizons moderator William Brangham explores the state of America’s public health system and whether it's prepared for the next pandemic with Dr. Josh Sharfstein and Elizabeth Cameron.
Over the past two decades, we have grown accustomed to describing pandemics and biological emergencies as “once-in-a-generation” events. That framing no longer holds. What we are facing is not a sequence of rare shocks, but a structural shift in risk—one driven by climate disruption, ecological pressure, global mobility, and the accelerating convergence of artificial intelligence with the life sciences.
On Saturday, the Rhode Island Department of Health confirmed the state’s first measles case of 2026. The state’s last confirmed measles case was in January 2025 — the first since 2013.
Hegseth says U.S. military no longer requires flu vaccination, drawing criticism from health experts
The decision to no longer enforce mandatory annual flu shots for military personnel could mean more troops will get sick during flu season, one expert says
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Vaccination is one of the most successful global health interventions in history, eradicating or eliminating some of the deadliest diseases through decades of coordinated effort. But that success is increasingly under pressure. Trust in vaccines has declined globally, fueled by the proliferation of misinformation and growing politicization of public health, making rising vaccine hesitancy one of the defining global health threats today.
President Donald Trump nominated former Deputy Surgeon General Erica Schwartz, a physician, as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Schwartz is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps who served as a deputy surgeon general during the COVID-19 pandemic in Trump's first term. Schwartz played a key role in the nation's COVID response, helping coordinate national preparedness during the first year of the pandemic.
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From a once-in-a-century global pandemic, to wars in Europe and the Middle East, to the unchecked rise of AI and social media technologies, we are living in an age of threats against humanity that are profound, fast-moving, and interconnected.
In this episode of Saving the World from Bad Ideas, Mark Lynas speaks with Dr Seth Berkley, infectious disease epidemiologist, former CEO of Gavi, and co-founder of COVAX, about what the world got right and wrong during COVID-19.
They discuss vaccine equity, pandemic preparedness, the politicisation of public health, and why the world remains dangerously vulnerable to future outbreaks. From the rapid development of mRNA vaccines to the rise of vaccine disinformation and the growing threat of H5N1 bird flu, this conversation is a sobering reminder that pandemics do not end just because societies stop wanting to talk about them.
In the afternoon on Friday, March 27, Georgetown University’s Medical and Dental Building turned into a site of organized chaos as an unknown infection struck. Dozens of people hustled through the hallways, trying to earn enough money to buy food and stay healthy. Public health staffers tried their best to execute their roles, some with little prior experience, the atmosphere creating a trial by fire. Government instructions were scant, and media reports were often conflicting. It was a palpable frenzy of activity and cooperation.
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Dr Seth Berkley is an epidemiologist and global health leader whose career has been shaped by one central problem: vaccines save lives, but only if people can actually get them.
His 40-year career has spanned the global, from helping to build Uganda’s first HIV surveillance system and founding the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; to leading Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance for more than a decade – overseeing the immunisation of hundreds of millions of children worldwide. And when COVID-19 struck, Seth co-founded COVAX, the global initiative designed to stop wealthy nations monopolising vaccines.
In conversation with Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Seth discusses the highs and lows of his globe-trotting career - from saving millions of young lives through vaccine distribution, to setting his own shattered leg after a climbing accident in Namibia - and addresses the huge challenge of tackling vaccine scepticism.
While the School of Public Health was not officially founded until 2013, public health has remained a pertinent topic since the University’s founding. On Monday, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Faculty Fellow in University History William Goedel PhD’20 hosted a talk on the longer evolution of public health at the University, starting primarily in the 1800s.
At first glance, newly released data on immunization rates among children in Massachusetts seem to validate the efforts by state officials to lead a national resistance to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s antivax ideology.
And indeed, overall vaccination rates this school year held firm, according to the Department of Public Health, itself an accomplishment at a time when the federal government is aggressively trying to reverse decades of time-tested immunization policy.
The United States declared victory in the fight against measles in 2000, saying the once common and deadly illness had been eliminated. But that could be changing, as measles makes an unwelcome global comeback. Canada already lost its measles-elimination status last year, and now the United States and Mexico—where cases have climbed into the thousands—face a similar fate.
Respiratory syncytial virus is continuing to spread later into the spring than usual, driving most states to extend the window for RSV immunizations for eligible infants and toddlers.
The CDC has paused diagnostic testing for more than two dozen infectious diseases —including rabies and pox viruses — according to the agency’s website.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told Healio that the pause is temporary while the CDC “evaluates these assays as part of our routine review to uphold our commitment to high-quality laboratory testing.”
The largest measles outbreak in the United States seems to be winding down. The South Carolina Department of Public Health says the state has now gone two full weeks without a new infection. Also, no one in the state is in quarantine or isolation for measles at this time, according to Brannon Traxler, MD, MPH, South Carolina’s chief medical officer.
Flu and Covid, including a new variant called BA.3.2, nicknamed “cicada,” are still circulating, along with several other respiratory illnesses and a nasty stomach bug that are leaving many Americans feeling cruddy.
The symptoms for most of the viruses are so similar — sniffles, cough, muscle aches, fever — that doctors say you really can’t tell what you’ve got without a test.
The School of Public Health’s Pandemic Center received a $900,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to launch a program for mid-career professionals in Africa designed to provide specialized training on biological threat reduction policy. The three-year initiative is set to launch in summer 2026 and will include a 9–10-week online course and a yearlong fellowship.
This hour, we look at the spread of measles in the United States. And we talk to health and science communicators who are working to tell the story of that disease in new ways.
Ahead of the World Cup, state health leaders say they are relying on a playbook they’ve used many times before, for blizzards, holiday celebrations, championship games, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Boston Marathon bombing.
Yet the World Cup dwarfs virtually any other event hosted in the region in decades, spanning 16 North American cities over five weeks and drawing an estimated 2 million fans to Greater Boston. Players and ticket-holders will ricochet across not just the region, but the country.
Measles cases continue to rise – this is worrying. The good news is that there is a super effective vaccine that protects you and your loved ones.
Note – we use data from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Brown University Pandemic Center’s weekly tracking report. While the CDC tracks confirmed cases only, the Pandemic Center tracks both probable and confirmed cases using publicly available data from state health departments. (Numbers below are correct as of March 13, 2026).
Americans’ trust in federal vaccine recommendations declines markedly under Trump
One in three Americans trust childhood vaccine guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics more than the CDC’s recommendations, a new poll finds
Just six in 10 Americans trust the federal government’s childhood vaccine recommendations, a new poll finds. That marks a notable drop from June 2025, when 71 percent of poll respondents said they trusted the government’s vaccine guidance. The greatest decline was among Democrats—from 81 percent to 66 percent—although Republicans’ and Independents’ trust also waned.
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In March 2020, the World Health Organization’s director-general declared COVID-19 a pandemic, saying the agency was “deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” Since the virus emerged six years ago, the disease has taken the lives of more than 7 million people, according to data tracked by KFF, a health research organization. COVID infections have left hundreds of millions of people with long COVID, a complex and chronic condition.
“We’re going to have more pandemics,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, noting that data shows that the chances of future pandemics and the frequency with which they could occur are increasing.
Recently, the Trump administration offered $20 billion to provide re-insurance coverage for vessels sailing through the Strait of Hormuz amid conflict in the Middle East. Yet, closer to home, there is an immediate public health threat posed by the resurgence of measles, a serious disease once under control that needs federal support.
Measles outbreaks are a medical and systems issue, emerging from vaccination behavior, public trust, health policy and the capacity of the public health infrastructure to handle increasing demands. One can rightfully ask whether the idea of federal support for emergency economic issues should also apply to the costs associated with measles.
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In the three decades between 1993 and 2024, measles in the U.S. was relatively rare – a few hundred cases each year, at most. But suddenly, the disease has become so entrenched in American life that it sometimes fails to make headlines when a new outbreak erupts.
As of March 2026, measles has been continuously circulating around the U.S. for more than a year, starting with an outbreak in Texas that lasted from January to August 2025. Before that outbreak was declared over, an outbreak on the Utah and Arizona border began in August and is ongoing. An outbreak in South Carolina began in September, drastically increased in January 2026, and continues.
South Plains, Texas, had long declared its measles outbreak over when in January wastewater testing picked up what Zachary Holbrooks called “a blip, a spike.”
The testing found measles after months without traces of the virus, which by the 2025 West Texas outbreak’s end infected over 750 people, hospitalized nearly a hundred, and two children died.
In the year that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been in office, his agency has made unprecedented changes to the childhood immunization schedule, removing universal recommendations for a half-dozen vaccines in favor of “shared clinical decisionmaking.”
Measles outbreak erupts in one of U.S.’s largest ICE detention centers
Camp East Montana, one of the largest immigration detention facilities in the U.S., has reported 14 confirmed measles infections, triggering the El Paso center to close to visitors