As if Dengue wasn’t enough, now health authorities fear an outbreak of Oropouche Fever, a mosquito-borne disease that is most common in the Amazon Rainforest region.
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Bother, now Ontario 
has had a case of measles with no known risk factors such as international travel. (“Sentinal” event, anyone?)
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Yesterday, my county, 40 miles from Windsor, ON (in the US) announced a case of measles. I think what this means is there are other cases not yet reported from exposure to people who have traveled to, say, Florida. 
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The truly scary probability is that (as in FL) it gets into a nest of vaccine avoiders. That’s how you get large outbreaks, start involving vaccinated nonresponders, kids too young to vaccinate and the immune compromised. I know I say this all the time, but this does not have to happen. These things are preventable. Vaccines work.
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Measles without borders. Thanks antivaxxers.
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[Leprosy Is Spreading in Florida (newsweek.com)]
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(gift link ↓)
Bird flu has reached goats for the first time, a development officials call significant in the nationwide outbreak that began two years ago.
Several baby goats in western Minnesota died earlier this month after being infected with the same strain of avian influenza that has killed millions of birds across the country since 2022, the Minnesota Board of Animal Health announced this week.
While bird flu has found its way to mammals like dogs and skunks before, this is the first time in the United States the virus has been found in a ruminant — a group of animals that includes cattle, sheep and goats.
“It highlights the possibility of the virus infecting other animals on farms with multiple species,” state veterinarian Dr. Brian Hoefs said in a statement. “Thankfully, research to date has shown mammals appear to be dead-end hosts, which means they’re unlikely to spread [the virus] further.”
[…]
“The risk to the public is extremely low, and any risk of infection is limited to people in direct contact with infected animals,” the board said. “To date, no people in the United States have become ill following contact with mammals infected with this virus.”
[…]
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It’s weird that for there to be animal to human transmission, it had to jump to an intermediary species?
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In addition to focusing on children, experts are closely tracking a new situation that doesn’t fit the traditional mpox story. Attention has been focused on the gold-rich city of Kamituga in the South Kivu province, which never used to have mpox cases.
Things to note about this particular outbreak:
- This is Clade 1 mpox, which has a mortality rate ~10x that of the clade 2 outbreak we had recently.
- This is spreading in ways that we did not see previously, including heterosexual sex, through children and in other ways that are not currently clear.
- The medical resources in DRC are extremely limited, so control or even identification of cases is just not happening.
- Mpox vaccine has not been approved in Africa writ large, and there is no vaccine approved for children.
So far as we know, it is thus far limited in geographic scope, but the community it has erupted in is highly mobile and there are stories already of families fleeing the area due to social stigma of this disease. It will almost inevitably spread. But will it become an international threat? No clue, but absolutely worth watching. And, at the risk of preaching to the choir, yet another reason to push for better medical care in developing countries.
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Study: Hunters Die After Consuming CWD-Infected Venison
With several years of reports of disease in deer; this seemed inevitable.
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Inevitable, but not previously reported. Although why the hell people would think that CWD would be different than scrappie, mad cow disease, kuru or variant CJD from organ transplants, I have no idea. Prions are just evil, almost impossible to destroy and way too easy to transmit. I hate this a lot.
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