The recent E. coli outbreak, which recently spread across the United States, has brought up a lot of questions, both about this specific incident and others like it.
How many people are affected?
As of May 2, 2018, over 100 people are reported sick with the current total standing at 121. There has been one death and 52 hospitalizations so far.
It’s pretty likely that you know a person with a peanut allergy.
About .5 to 1 percent of people are allergic to the food, making it one of the most common food allergies. To make things worse, those numbers appear to be growing. The number of individuals who are allergic to peanuts is increasing, especially in recent years. While it’s unfortunate that these people miss out on a beloved food, the allergy can be quite dangerous too. Peanuts and related products create one of the most severe reactions for food allergies.
Thankfully, research for a peanut allergy vaccine is underway.
Nearly 2.8 million people from yellow fever endemic countries flew to the United States in 2016. Such a large amount of foreign visitors can create an issue if there’s no requirement for yellow fever vaccine certificates.
Many cities in the U.S. are now realizing this problem could be the source of future yellow fever outbreaks.
The mosquito-borne illness is normally found in tropical and subtropical areas of Africa and South America. The virus only reaches U.S. travelers in extremely rare cases. Out of roughly 200,000 yellow fever cases per year worldwide, 90 percent are in Africa.
Venezuela is currently in the middle of a tremendous malaria crisis with case amounts five times higher than they were in 2013.
Numbers have been growing rapidly over the years. In 2017, the country had approximately 406,000 cases of malaria, which is up almost 70 percent from 2016. That year alone had a rise of approximately 76 percent of cases from 2015.
The spike’s cause cannot be traced to one sole factor, though officials cite falling malaria education and prevention efforts as a primary force.
The severity of the recent flu season wasn’t lost on officials trying to stop the virus.
“We need to make the universal flu vaccine a higher priority than it has been,” said Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Fauci revealed this when speaking to The Scientist in January.
Why is the influenza virus so difficult to combat, and why do we need to change the vaccination every year?
