Vaccinating Pregnant Women For COVID Seems to Give Future Protection to Their Babies

If a pregnant woman catches COVID, it’s very rare for the virus to be passed through the placenta to the fetus. But it’s long been known that a mother’s antibodies can cross the placental barrier to the baby and can also be transferred via breast milk after the baby is born. This is why it’s … Read more

The First Evidence of Omicron Spilling Over Into Wild Animals Has Just Been Found

Vaughn Cooper sees white-tailed deer every day in his neighborhood outside Pittsburgh. The species is common in most US states. Pennsylvania alone has around 1.5 million white-tailed deer – about 30 per square mile (2.6 square km) – while the US has around 30 million in total.   “My dog goes ripping after the deer … Read more

A New, ‘Highly Virulent’ HIV Variant Was Just Discovered in Europe

A newfound variant of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has been uncovered in the Netherlands and appears to cause faster disease progression compared with other versions of the virus.   The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infects and destroys immune cells called CD4 cells in the body, causing the number of these cells to plummet. … Read more

World-First Experiment That Infected People With Coronavirus Shares Early Results

Scientists deliberately infected young, healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 – and now, they’ve shared their first results from that experiment.      The new study, published Tuesday (Feb. 1) in Springer Nature’s preprint database, In Review, has not yet been peer-reviewed, but it could provide insight into how mild COVID-19 unfolds, from the moment … Read more

Scientists deliberately infected people with coronavirus. Here’s what happened | Science

Researchers in the United Kingdom yesterday posted the results of a first-of-its-kind study in which healthy young volunteers were purposely infected with an early strain of the pandemic coronavirus. As hoped, none of the participants got seriously ill, and scientists were able to closely track their symptoms and gain unique insight into how both SARS-CoV-2 … Read more