Earlier this year, a team of scientists garnered a wave of media attention with their provocative report: They claimed to have found two cases of a rare but fatal prion disease in hunters that could have plausibly been caused by them eating contaminated deer meat—a frightening reminder of the mad cow crisis over 30…
A teen girl’s kitten turned out to cause much more trouble than usual. In a new case report this month, doctors in Portugal describe how the cat likely transmitted an usually mild germ that caused the girl to develop a serious and rare bone infection. Thankfully, once the infection was identified and treated, the girl…
Earlier this month, South Carolina resident Brent Norman had an especially unlucky time at the beach.
A Florida woman’s serious pneumonia that landed her in the hospital turned out to have a very strange culprit: deer meat tainted by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Though it took some time for the woman’s doctors to discover the true cause of her worsening illness, they were able to treat her in time once they did.
A Canadian man found a rat in his toilet, and his month only got worse from there. In a recent case report, the man’s doctors described how he contracted an unusual and severe infection from being bitten by the rodent—one that ultimately sent him to the intensive care unit. Thankfully, he was successfully treated.
One of the most existentially frightening illnesses ever to be discovered was mad cow disease, a fatal prion-spread illness that appeared in animals in the 1980s and killed over 200 people during the height of the outbreak in the late 1990s. You don’t hear much about mad cow today, but the threat still looms. Here’s…
Our mouths and guts are teeming with mysterious somethings that are unknown to science, new research suggests. A team says they’ve discovered distinct virus-like structures hanging out among the bacteria that live in our bodies. The researchers have coined these structures “obelisks,” and they might further redefine…
A medical treatment given to children in the UK may have led to some developing Alzheimer’s disease decades later, new research out Monday suggests. The study presents evidence that at least five people contracted the neurodegenerative disorder from having received human growth hormones contaminated with rogue amyloid…
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Veterinarians are working to figure out the cause behind a cluster of respiratory illnesses in dogs across the U.S. Over 200 suspected cases have been documented since late summer, mostly from Oregon. The illness appears to have a low fatality rate, but dogs have experienced prolonged symptoms and haven’t responded…
