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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For the last five decades, cholera has been a consistent health risk in various parts of the world. Recent outbreaks in Haiti and Yemen have proven difficult to stop, but cholera risks started long before.

It hasn’t always been that way.

Research published in the National Academy of Sciences reveals the source of that ongoing cholera problem. An evolved bacterial signaling network has been the source of global cholera deaths for over 50 years.

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In the past, animals have been carriers of various new flu strains.

Birds and pigs both developed the virus in the past, eventually passing them on to humans. Once we were infected, the terms bird flu and swine flu filled news coverage. Around the world, people worried about the deadly risks brought on by these outbreaks.

A new study concluded that dogs may be the source of the next flu epidemic. Conducted by the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the study showed that canine have the potential to host a new, dangerous strain.

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Though the disease originates in Africa, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have put together a tuberculosis timeline which shows that it was largely spread by the Roman Empire.

TB is one of the world’s most prevalent and deadly diseases. According to the CDC, it affects one in four people around the globe and is the leading killer of those who are infected with HIV. In 2016, a staggering 10.4 million people were infected with the illness and 1.7 million tuberculosis-related deaths occurred.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) is the strain that many recent historical-research TB investigations focused on. According to bioRxiv, the same strain was also the subject of the 2018 study.

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Another reason to travel, but you may actually learn something on this trip. DNA tourism is a growing trend for travelers that want to discover their own heritage.

Families are much more likely to be spread across the globe. Maybe you’ve relocated to another state or country for work and are situated in a foreign land. There are many other reasons why people don’t know much about their heritage; perhaps your parents don’t know much about their family history and can’t offer a tree to help.

But, websites like Ancestry.com and the fast-growing 23andMe offer a scientific solution.

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By breaking down malaria, we may have another breakthrough in disease prevention.

Researchers have discovered how Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) malaria parasites enter human red blood cells at the atomic level. The finding could allow scientists to create antibodies to stop various strains of the virus from infecting people.

The discovery was made possible with a Nobel Prize-winning technology called “cryo-EM”, or cryo-electron microscopy. Using a 3-D map, a team was able to visualize exactly what happens when P. vivax interacts with human red blood cells. The groundbreaking team hailed from the University of Melbourne and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia and from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States.

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