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…
Earlier this month, South Carolina resident Brent Norman had an especially unlucky time at the beach.
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…
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…
The global burden and death toll of fungi has substantially climbed over the past decade, new research finds. The study estimates that fungal infections help kill nearly 4 million people annually—almost double the amount estimated by similar research in 2012. Co-infections like HIV and tuberculosis, a lack of speedy…
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One animal’s poo might be another person’s treasure. Scientists in the UK say they’ve discovered viruses that could be turned into a weapon against bacterial superbugs in a perhaps unexpected place: the feces of several endangered species at a nearby zoo. The team believes these viruses could be especially effective…
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