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FORT BEND COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) -- Fort Bend County is now at its highest risk level for COVID-19 transmission, according to county health officials. Tuesday morning, the county moved its alert level to red for the virus. Fort Bend Health and Human Services also announced that all fixed testing sites will close at 1 p.m. today due to the projected heat index. According to a release on Twitter, appointments are being rescheduled. County leaders say they are seeing exponential growth of the virus and they are urging residents to stay home as much as possible and follow CDC guidelines on wearing face masks, social distancing and washing hands. There are more than 5,000 positive cases of coronavirus in Fort Bend County right now, that is more than double the number of cases from just four w...

These mucosal immune responses seem to underlie the success of the oral polio vaccine, which contains a weakened form of polio virus and has helped most of the world eradicate polio. When it debuted in the 1960s, the vaccine was considered, in many ways, an enormous improvement over its injected predecessor because it targeted the body’s immune response in the gut, where the virus thrives. Many people who took the oral vaccine seemed to quash infections even before they felt symptoms — or passed the germ on to others. “It was a fabulous vaccine to stop the transmission of polio,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine expert at Johns Hopkins University. “It helped induce herd immunity,” she said, referring to the threshold of the population that needs to be immune to a pathogen to keep it from s...

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At least 43 people have tested positive for coronavirus after attending a large house party in Michigan, health officials said Monday. The majority of the cases are among people between the ages of 15 and 25 years who went to or came in contact with someone who went to a house party between July 2 and 3 in the area of Saline, about 10 miles south of Ann Arbor, the Washtenaw County Health Department said in a statement. Another 66 people, not including family members who live with the 44 who are infected, have been exposed to the virus. These include employees and customers of retail stores, restaurants, canoe liveries, clubs, camps, athletic team members and employees and residents of a retirement community. Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered wee...

A squirrel has tested positive for the bubonic plague in the Town of Morrison in Colorado, Jefferson County Public Health officials announced in a statement over the weekend. The squirrel, discovered on Saturday, is the first case of plague in Jefferson County, the statement said.  A spokesperson for Jefferson County Public Health told CBS News on Tuesday that someone in Morrison reported seeing at least 15 dead squirrels around the town. Officials tested one, and since it was positive for bubonic plague, they expect others are also infected. In a statement, officials warned that plague, an infectious disease caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, can be contracted by humans and household animals. They said humans can be infected through flea bites, the cough of an infected animal...