Month: June 2021

The infectious and contagious rabies virus, shown here in a colorized micrograph, can be transmitted to humans through the bite or saliva of an infected animal. Thanks to protective vaccination of pets, rabies was eliminated from the U.S. dog population in 2007, though a bite from infected bats, skunks and raccoons can still transmit the virus. Biophoto Associates/Science Source hide caption toggle caption Biophoto Associates/Science Source The i...

(Samuel Corum, Erin Scott-Pool/Getty Images) Donald Trump Jr. went after Dr. Anthony Fauci during an interview with Lisa Boothe — condemning him as a “bureaucrat in a lab coat” who “cost lives” due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. After opening the episode by claiming that “every negative news story about President Trump was a lie,” Boothe invited Trump Jr. to further discuss the media’s relationship with his father and his family. The two discussed the theory that Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology — Trump Jr. condemning the media for dismissing it as a conspiracy while his father was president, only to deem it possible now that he is out of office. “It’s absolutely insane,” he said on Monday’s The Truth with Lisa Boothe. “And...

“Most of us in infectious disease really attributed that to masks — not just masks, but the combination of masks, people working largely from home, social distancing, all of those measures that have been in place for the last year,” said Dr. Joshua Barocas, an infectious diseases physician at Boston Medical Center. But as vaccination rates increase and such precautions are slowly scrapped, other viruses will start to resurge, starting with colds and other viruses later this summer, and the flu come fall and winter. On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory about increased cases of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, across parts of the southern United States — something they hadn’t seen since April 2020, when cases “decreased rapidly.” RSV is ...

Although new COVID-19 cases are declining across most of the nation, eight states are seeing increases – and seven of those have below-average vaccination rates, new data reveals. Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Missouri, Nevada, Texas, Utah and Wyoming have seen their seven-day rolling averages for infection rates rise from two weeks earlier, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. All of them except Hawaii have recorded vaccination rates that are lower than the U.S. average of 43% fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some states are seeing increased immunity after high rates of natural spread of the disease, which has so far killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. “We certainly are getting some population benefit from our previous ...