After a year and a half of lab work, it was announced in June 2018 that a team from the University of Florida has discovered the first known case of a person infected with the Keystone virus.
Perhaps more startling is the thought from the study’s corresponding author J. Glenn Morris, M.D., M.P.H. Morris stated that the virus has likely been common in people in the Southeast for some time and we just lacked a way to test for it.
Malaria infected approximately 216 million people worldwide in 2016, according to the WHO. That same year, Uganda saw between 70,000 and 100,000 cases of the mosquito-borne disease. Currently, the only way to detect malaria is through a blood test.
At least, until a recent breakthrough from someone who has firsthand experience with those many cases in Uganda.
So, who is the person to invent such a non-invasive device?
There has been an increase in cases of dengue fever, along with many other infectious diseases worldwide.
Over the past 50 years, dengue fever incidence has increased 30-fold, according to Science Direct. Cases spiked to about 390 million recorded in 2010 alone. You can associate the rise in cases with globalization, demographic trends, and travel.
But, as of lately, environmental changes are also contributing. Warming temperatures have been behind the amplified spread of dengue fever.
The recent deaths of women from Oregon and New Mexico due to hantavirus have many asking, “What is Hantavirus?”
Essentially, hantavirus is a severe, potentially deadly, respiratory disease carried by rodents. There are several types of the virus, including the Andes virus and Seoul virus.
To date, no person-to-person contact has led to infection in the United States, though this has happened in Argentina and Chile. Hantavirus is best known to progress to HPS (Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome) though it can remain a non-pulmonary hantavirus infection.
In the last year, there’s been a rise in diseases with a vaccine throughout the world. We’ve seen many recent outbreaks of diseases like yellow fever, cholera and measles.
There appears to be a similar risk of the illnesses in the United States.
A rise in the use of nonmedical vaccine exemptions in the U.S. means that preventable diseases are also on the rise, as shown by a June 2018 paper published in PLOS Medicine.
