With every new infection, the pandemic coronavirus gets new chances to mutate and adapt, creating opportunities for the virus to evolve new variants that are better at dodging our immune systems and ...

The patient in Louisiana who was hospitalized with severe bird flu illness was found to have a mutated version of the virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last ...

Helen Branswell covers issues broadly related to infectious diseases, including outbreaks, preparedness, research, and vaccine development. Follow her on Mastodon and Bluesky. You can reach Helen on ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns that while the risk of human to human transmission remains low, ...

The fate of a Canadian teenager who was infected with H5N1 bird flu in early November, and subsequently admitted to an intensive care unit, has finally been revealed: She has fully recovered. But ...

A drug widely used to treat COVID-19 might be spurring the evolution of new SARS-CoV-2 variants. The drug, molnupiravir, works by introducing a flurry of mutations to the viral genome; this helps to ...

At least 58 people in the U.S. have been infected by the H5N1 bird flu virus this year, according to federal statistics. All but two of them had been around cows or chickens, two species in which H5N1 ...

Scientists have discovered that H5N1, the strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus currently spreading in U.S. dairy cows, only needs a single mutation to readily latch on to human cells ...

Editor’s Note (1/6/25): The Louisiana Department of Health has announced that the patient in the state who had been hospitalized with severe H5N1 avian influenza has died. The individual had ...

Researchers have developed EVE-Vax, a computational design tool that creates synthetic SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins mimicking future immune-evading variants. These designed proteins enable early ...