Category: Health
Vaccine to curb chlamydia epidemic devastating koalas approved
A vaccine which could save Australia’s endangered koala population from a rampant chlamydia epidemic has been approved for rollout for the first time. University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) scientists have spent more than a decade developing a jab to curb the spread of the disease, which has devastated wild koala populations across most of eastern Australia. “Some individual wild colonies, where infection rate can be as high as 70%, are edging closer to extinction every day,” Peter Timms said. With approval from regulators now secured, he said the team hoped for major funding to distribute the vaccine to wildlife hospitals, vet clinics and koalas in the wild. “It has been a long road… There’s been points along the pathway I think we nearly gave up,” Dr Timms, a microbiologist, said. “Today’s a very exciting day.” Chlamydia – which is transmitted by close contact or mating – can cause painful urinary tract infections, conjunctivitis, blindness and infertility in koalas, and is often fatal. Both male and female koalas can contract the disease, which is a different strain to the one found in humans, while joeys can catch it through feeding in their mother’s pouch. But treatment can be deadly too. Koalas infected with chlamydia are usually given antibiotics, but this destroys the gut bacteria which allow them to digest eucalyptus leaves – their primary food source – and can lead to starvation. The much-loved national icon has faced increasing threats to its wild populations across much of eastern Australia in recent decades, from factors including land clearing, natural disasters, feral pests and urbanisation. Chlamydia, however, has been the biggest killer – accounting for as much as 50% of deaths and claiming thousands of koalas.Some estimate only 50,000 of the animals remain in the wild,and there are fears they will be extinct in some states within a generation. UniSC’s single-dose chlamydia vaccine has been tested on hundreds of wild koalas, and its approval by federal regulators was based on analysis of a decade’s worth of those trials – a study the university described as the largest and longest ever conducted on wild koalas.
US death rate dropped back to pre-Covid levels in 2024, CDC report says
The death rate in the United States returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2024 as Covid-19 fell out of the top 10 leading causes of death, according to a report published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Covid-19 quickly rose to the third leading cause of death in the US in the first two years of the pandemic, pushing the age-adjusted death rate up to a peak of about 880 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2021. The overall US death rate has fallen about 18% since then, and last year’s 4% drop brought the US death rate down to the lowest it’s been since 2019. There were 722 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2024 – nearly 3.1 million deaths overall – according to the provisional, age-adjusted data from the CDC. Final mortality data may change, but the latest data are based on 99.9% of all 2024 death records received and processed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics as of June 1, 2025. And despite an unprecedented drop in 2024, drug overdoses and other unintentional injuries were the third leading cause of death in the US for the third year in a row. Covid-19 was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022 and the tenth in 2023, according to CDC data. There were still tens of thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the US last year, but suicide moved up to the tenth leading cause of death – with nearly 49,000 lives lost in 2024. Suicide mortality reached a record high in the US 2022 and has decreased only slightly in the years since. Millions of people have called, texted, or sent chats to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline since mid-2022; about a tenth of those individuals who reached were routed to a specialized subnetwork for LGBTQ+ youth, but the Trump administration ended that service in July. Death rates decreased for most age groups in 2024, the new CDC report shows, but held steady for children ages 5 to 14 and for infants.
Florida’s surgeon general said he didn’t calculate the costs of ending vaccine mandates in the state. But scientists have.
Florida’s surgeon general said Sunday that he had not weighed the cost – in terms of infections, hospitalizations or deaths – of ending vaccine mandates in his state. But scientists who have done those calculations say those costs may be high. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether he had done any data analysis or projections of how many new cases of vaccine-preventable disease there would be if the mandates were lifted for everyone in Florida, including schoolchildren, as he proposed last week, Dr. Joseph Ladapo answered, “Absolutely not.” “Do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their children’s bodies? I don’t need an analysis on that,” he said. Scientists have crunched the numbers, however. Infectious disease forecasters at Stanford University who recently looked at the effects of falling vaccination rates across the country found that in Florida alone, a 15% decline in vaccinations against measles over 25 years would lead to 1 million measles cases. The state is particularly vulnerable because of its large population and brisk tourism industry, according to lead study author Dr. Mathew Kiang. Disney World in Orlando has often been the site of measles cases imported from other countries, for example. “Unvaccinated groups in the United States are sort of like tinder, and vaccines are sort of fire protection, and so every imported case is like throwing a match into the fire,” said Kiang, an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. “For most of them, nothing is going to happen, but what you don’t want is a situation where one happens and then it comes roaring back like a wildfire.”For every 1,000 measles cases, there are between 1 and 3 deaths from breathing complications or brain swelling. If there are a million cases, that’s about 1,000 deaths that doctors consider preventable with the use of vaccines.
In groundbreaking study, researchers publish brain map showing how decisions are made
Neuroscientists from 22 labs joined forces in an unprecedented international partnership to produce a landmark achievement: a neural map that shows activity across the entire brain during decision-making. The data, gathered from 139 mice, encompass activity from more than 600,000 neurons in 279 areas of the brain — about 95% of the brain in a mouse. This map is the first to provide a complete picture of what happens across the brain as a decision is made. “They have created the largest dataset anyone has ever imagined at this scale,” said Dr. Paul W. Glimcher, chair of the department of neuroscience and physiology and director of the Neuroscience Institute at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, of the researchers. In the field of neuroscience, “this is going to go down in history as a major event,” Glimcher, who was not involved in the new research, told CNN. To construct the map, researchers first created a standardized procedure to be shared across laboratories and then tracked neural activity in mice as the rodents responded to visual prompts, integrating all the data gathered by each lab. Seven years in the making and presented in two studies, the findings were published on September 3 in the journal Nature. “There are basically two big results, which is why we have two papers,” said Alexandre Pouget, a full professor in basic neuroscience at the University of Geneva. One study outlined the widespread distribution of electrical activity related to decision-making. The other used the data to evaluate how expectations shape choices. Pouget is a coauthor of the first study and senior author of the second. “We started from scratch,” he told CNN. “Nobody had ever attempted to do something like this before.”