Archive for global health
My nursing story: Alexis Schmid
Dr. Alexis Schmid is a nurse in the Emergency Department at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Maggie Ryan Endowed Global Health Fellow. Fifty million children around the world are currently migrants or refugees, uprooted from their homes due to violence, poverty, or other factors out of their control. The statistics are alarming: Approximately 70 percent ... Read More
The threat from mosquito-borne diseases: Forecasting mosquitoes’ global spread
Outbreaks of mosquito-borne illnesses like yellow fever, dengue, Zika and chikungunya are rising around the world. Climate change has created conditions favorable to mosquitoes’ spread, but so have human travel and migration and accelerating urbanization, creating new mini-habitats for mosquitoes. In Nature Microbiology yesterday, a large group of international collaborators combined these factors into prediction models that ... Read More
“Teenage” red blood cells could hold the key to a malaria vaccine
Malaria parasite infection, which affects our red blood cells, can be fatal. Currently, there are about 200 million malaria infections in the world each year and more than 400,000 people, mostly children, die of malaria each year. Now, studying blood samples from patients treated for malaria at a clinical field station in Brazil’s Amazon jungle, ... Read More
Effective vaccination of newborns: Getting closer to the dream
In many parts of the world, babies have just one chance to be vaccinated: when they’re born. Unfortunately, newborns’ young immune systems don’t respond well to most vaccines. That’s why, in the U.S., most immunizations start at two months of age. Currently, only BCG, polio vaccine and hepatitis B vaccines work in newborns, and the ... Read More