A few years ago, 4,000-year-old bodies were uncovered in Russia. The bodies were those of a man and a woman who had been buried together. Once found, the bodies were sent to the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

There, Maria Spyrou uncovered something fascinating in their teeth that she published in Nature Communications in June: a bacteria responsible for the infamous Black Death.

The Black Death, brought on by the bubonic plague, remains one of the world’s deadliest pandemics. Spreading across Europe in the 14th century, the plague killed one-third of its population at the time. The cause and spread of the Black Death has long been researched and questioned.

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HIV officially came on the medical scene back in the early 1980s. This doesn’t mean scientific evidence of HIV started with the false discovery of “Patient Zero” in the decade. We suspect that the virus is much older and the medical community likely had some knowledge of it before then.

But, it’s in the 1980s that HIV started garnering worldwide attention.

Since that time, the virus reached to every region. According to HIV.gov, almost 37 million individuals were HIV positive in 2016. Each year an additional 1.8 million people are diagnosed with this highly contagious virus.

Over the last 35 years, researchers and scientists have developed a few different immunizations that targeted specific virus strains. Unfortunately, all were deemed unsuccessful.

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It’s long been understood that our immune systems get worse as we age.

But, recently scientists conducted a study for a virus that causes a different effect. In the study, the virus can trigger an older persons immune system to fight other pathogens.

The new study was conducted on the virus called Cytomegalovirus, or CMV. Not only does the virus prove helpful, but also very common in humans. According to the CDC, the virus infects one-third of children before they turn five.

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Yellow fever and malaria are both mosquito-borne diseases, but what makes them different? In this post we’re going to compare the two illnesses to help you understand each one inside and out.

How and Where do Malaria and Yellow Fever Spread?

The CDC shares that malaria spreads through Anopheles mosquitoes while yellow fever transmission occurs with Aedes or Haemagogus species.

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Two years after the height of the Zika outbreak, we’re still learning more dangers of the virus.

New research published in Nature reports that Zika infection greatly increases risk of miscarriages and stillbirths. It’s not the possibility of these effects that surprises scientists. They knew of some risk, but the research shows that chances could triple what recent calculations estimated.

When the Zika outbreak began, it was largely feared for the birth defects it could cause. Because of the 2018 study, we now know infection can also lead to placenta damage, which in turn may result in a loss of pregnancy.

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