Disease ecology

Metagenomic sequencing can help detect unknown pathogens, but its widespread use faces challenges.

The parasite appears to make infected wolves less risk-averse, potentially influencing the behavior of packs.

Bats that experience food shortages due to climate change and habitat loss end up roosting in urban settings, where they shed more of the deadly Hendra virus. 

The black fur allele has fitness costs but also confers higher immunity against canine distemper virus, making mix-and-match mating key to population survival.

Parts of Southeast Asia where human and bat population densities are highest could be infection hotspots, a study finds.

The Georgetown University biologist studies how climate change contributes to the emergence of new zoonotic threats.

Researchers demonstrate that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is more stable and binds the human ACE2 receptor with much higher affinity than the spike protein of its closest known relative, bat coronavirus RaTG13.

Understanding how domestic pigs can be infected with the deadly virus could be key to protecting them from it.

African swine fever virus has left the continent on three occasions, causing outbreaks in Europe, the Americas, and most recently, East Asia.

Mathematical models reveal that current vaccination rates in Texas schools could pave the way for the virus to spread to hundreds of people.

Only a handful of contagious cancers are known to exist, yet they have attracted an increasing number of researchers worldwide trying to understand how and why they arise.

The large-scale experiments aim to test how the technology would fare in the wild, if deployed to knock down populations of the pests.

Black-and-white painted skin can help protect from insect bites.

Scientists debate why the number of whooping cough cases is up, and whether the effectiveness of a vaccine introduced within the last two decades is to blame.

Climate change may open up new habitats suitable for the virus’s spread.

Scientists surveyed coral colonies in Hawaii for disease after a mystery pathogen caused tissue from the common rice coral (Montipora capitata) to degenerate.   

In trouble? The sea otter is dying from parasitic diseases for which the only known hosts are terrestrial mammals.