human infection

The risk from H5N1 has never been greater – but making our farms biosecure is harder than it seems

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Imagine 40,000 people living next to each other in a shed for six weeks. Your intuition would rightly consider this a public health problem. It’s no surprise then that commercial broilers, chickens raised for their meat under such conditions, are particularly susceptible to pathogens spreading quickly through their ranks. Bacteria that cause food poisoning, such … Read more

NASA said to ‘act now’ to tackle pathogens in space

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In a quiet part of rural Arizona, hundreds of people die after suffering from blood clots almost immediately. Some die mid-pass, while others go ‘quietly mad’ before committing suicide, often in bizarre ways. The cause turns out to be a crashed satellite, which brings with it a deadly pathogen from space. A group of scientists … Read more