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Years after initial tests, researchers are now racing to see if a vaccine developed in 2011 can help fight the current Bundibugyo outbreak in Congo. Fever was the first symptom to grip the crab-eating macaques in their high-containment laboratory on an island off Texas after being infected with the newly discovered Bundibugyo strain of ebola . Then came the weight loss, the rectal bleeding and nosebleeds, while scientists in space suits drew blood to see how the monkeys' immune systems struggled to fight the aggressive virus. But the three monkeys that had received a newly developed vaccine to protect against the understudied strain showed no symptoms of the disease, which eventually killed two-thirds of their unvaccinated companions. It was 2011, and virologist Thomas Geisbert's work developing the vaccine was done.

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The Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases were launched during the Covid-19 pandemic. The group lost its funding under Trump in part due to conspiracy theories. As the world struggles to contain the rapidly growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Ituri province, a vital network of research centers has been unable to help on the ground. The reason: The Trump administration slashed its funding last year, in part due to conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. Established in 2020 by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) Network was conducting research into viruses that emerge from wildlife and spill over to people, including the family of viruses that Ebola belongs to.

CAR-T cell therapy is already a potent treatment for certain cancers. Now, a small study is showing early promise for managing HIV. A Miracle cancer therapy that involves engineering a patient's own immune cells is being repurposed for HIV, and early results from two individuals hint at its promise for long-term control of the virus. As part of a clinical trial, scientists took people's own immune cells and reprogrammed them in a lab to recognize and attack HIV in the body. After a single infusion of the modified cells, two individuals with HIV now have undetectable levels of the virus--one for nearly two years and the other for almost a year.

A lab at the University of Nebraska has developed a test that can detect the virus before symptoms become severe. Now, it's ready to start testing cruise ship passengers returning to the US. As passengers return to the US from the cruise that saw a rare hantavirus outbreak, much of the country is lacking a basic public health tool: a test to diagnose the illness in the earliest stages of infection. Nebraska may be the first state with the ability to do so. In just a few days, a lab at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha developed its own diagnostic test for the Andes virus in anticipation of receiving 16 American passengers from the ship. "I believe we might be the only lab in the nation that has this test available at the moment," Peter Iwen, director of the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory tells WIRED, referring to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, which was important during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Here's what you need to know, from why the cruise ship outbreak won't spark the next pandemic to how hantavirus spreads. Now that more than 100 passengers aboard a hantavirus -stricken luxury cruise ship have been evacuated, with 18 Americans in biocontainment units in Nebraska and Georgia, health officials around the world are working to monitor more than two dozen individuals who left the cruise and anyone with whom they might have come in close contact. So far, all of the 11 reported hantavirus cases are among passengers or crew on the ship, the World Health Organization's director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Madrid on Tuesday. That includes three deaths resulting from the virus. Typically, hantaviruses are spread when contaminated rodent droppings and urine are stirred up in the air and breathed in.

Here's What You Need to Know About the Hantavirus While the outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic is concerning, the virus isn't easily transmitted through casual contact. Cruises are so closely associated with illness that the highly contagious norovirus is commonly called the "cruise ship virus." But a ship headed for Spain's Canary Islands has attracted global attention due to a rare outbreak of hantavirus that's left three dead. While alarming, health officials and infectious disease experts say the risk to the general public right now is low because hantavirus is less contagious than other respiratory diseases like the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic . "This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently," Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at the World Health Organization, said at a press conference on Thursday.

Seven million people's cancer could be prevented each year, according to the first global analysis. A report by World Health Organization (WHO) scientists estimates 37% of cancers are caused by infections, lifestyle choices and environmental pollutants that could be avoided. This includes cervical cancers caused by human papilloma virus (HPV) infections which vaccination can help prevent, as well as a host of tumours caused by tobacco smoke from cigarettes. The researchers said their report showed there is a powerful opportunity to transform the lives of millions of people. Some cancers are inevitable - either because of damage we unavoidably build up in our DNA as we age or because we inherit genes that put us at greater risk of the disease.