3 entries tagged public health. All writing.
WORLD · OCTOBER 5, 2026 Siberia Plague Death: What We Know, What's Disputed, What Would Change the Picture A standing page on the death of an Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute lab worker, rewritten as the story moves. As of October 10 the story has gone quiet: Irkutsk lifted its quarantine on October 8 after nearly 5,000 negative lab tests, no second case has been confirmed and Russia calls the second-case reports incorrect, but the official cause is still "pneumonia of unknown origin" and the WHO is still asking which pathogen killed her. WORLD · OCTOBER 2, 2026 The Institute Built to Prevent This Had the Accident A 28-year-old lab worker at Russia's Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute died October 1 of suspected pneumonic plague, and nearly 200 people who had contact with her are now under medical observation. Officials haven't settled on how she was exposed — a broken test tube in the lab, or a recent trip near an active natural outbreak on the Mongolian border — and that gap matters more than the headline. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 The Mosquito That Can't Carry It Malaria killed about 610,000 people in 2024, three quarters of them children under five. One approach to ending it does not spray anything, distribute anything, or ask anyone to take a pill — it edits the mosquito so the parasite cannot survive inside it, and lets the edit spread itself through the wild population. There are two schools of thought about how to do that, they disagree about whether the mosquito should live, and the better-funded one just had its field programme shut down by a government. This is how the mechanism works and where it actually stands.