Matt Field

2 weeks ago | thebulletin.org | Matt Field

The World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters. Credit: ©Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA. Though countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sometimes collectively called the Global South, are increasingly central to scientific research, disease surveillance, and public health innovation, they historically have had little say in the shaping of policies meant to keep international health crises at bay.

2 weeks ago | thebulletin.org | Matt Field

In 2011, two teams of scientists created an uproar after revealing they had separately mutated the H5N1 bird flu virus to spread among ferrets through the air, something it didn’t do naturally. The teams had created a virus that, were it to be found in nature or leak from a lab, would be a potential pandemic threat, experts said. And critics questioned whether the benefits of the experiments had outweighed the risks.

3 weeks ago | thebulletin.org | Matt Field

Avian H5N1 took a big leap about four years ago. Previously the virus, first detected in the mid-1990s, would tear through domesticated poultry, killing off flocks in days. It occasionally jumped to wild birds, but it never managed to spread very far for very long. That changed in 2021 to 2022. Avian influenza or “bird flu” had long been fairly innocuous in wild birds, but the latest strain left birds severely stricken with neurological or other symptoms.

3 weeks ago | thebulletin.org | Matt Field

Avian H5N1 took a big leap about four years ago. Previously the virus, first detected in the mid-1990s, would tear through domesticated poultry, killing off flocks in days. It occasionally jumped to wild birds, but it never managed to spread very far for very long. That changed in 2021 to 2022. Avian influenza or “bird flu” had long been fairly innocuous in wild birds, but the latest strain left birds severely stricken with neurological or other symptoms.

3 weeks ago | thebulletin.org | Matt Field

PREMIUM A colorized structure of a prototype from an earlier trial for a universal flu vaccine, known as H1ssF_3928, at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD.