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In Dunn County, North Dakota, the roads can kill you. In fact, anything you do to disturb rocks in the area, like driving or even sweeping, can kick up naturally-occurring particles that lodge in your body and give you a rare kind of lung cancer up to 30 years later. Dunn County, you see, is home to a lot of rocks containing erionite, an asbestos-like substance that's highly toxic. Unfortunately, nobody knew that until very recently. And so at least 300 miles of roads in North Dakota are paved with the stuff. More »
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We already have many of the medicines we need to kill pandemic diseases. But to stop a pandemic itself, we need math. More »
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Diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, and now we know just where the disease it at its worst: in a cluster of 644 counties in 15 largely southeastern states, making up America's "Diabetes Belt." More »
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In 2009, swine flu created a minor pandemic, only killing about 15,000 people but infecting millions more. The avian flu H9N2 is ravaging bird populations throughout Asia. They're bad enough on their own...but what if they joined forces? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5772710&view=rss&microfeed=true Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, the non-lethal ape predecessor to HIV, might just be much older than current estimates, which peg it at only a few hundred years old. Research published in this week's Science shows the virus is at least 32,000 years old, and may even have been around for a million years. By analyzing simians that had been geographically isolated from mainland Africa for more than 10,000 years, they found significantly different versions of the virus, which they compared to already known variants in order to better understand the rate of mutation. Their evidence shows that the disease mutates much slower than previously thought, pushing back the origin to tens of thousands of years, and hinting that HIV might not mutate into a non-lethal form for a very long time. More »
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Though chronic fatigue syndrome is common, doctors still don't know what causes it. A study published today in Science, however, suggests the condition may be linked to human retrovirus (pictured). Does this mean you can catch chronic fatigue from somebody? More »
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Feeling worried about the impending swine flu epidemic? Just to make you feel more panicked, we've put together a list of 11 movies that show what happens when humanity is attacked by unstoppable viruses. More »
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A new case of CJD, or mad cow disease, has prompted scientists in the UK to warn that a new wave of the deadly condition is coming. And many more people could be infected. More »
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Radiologists, the people who examine the inside of your body using X-rays and other imaging tech, were among the first to discover a disturbing new syndrome called "self-embedding." No, it's not some cool piercing thing - here you can see the long, thin pieces of metal that a teenage girl has inserted in her arm. This is an actual disorder where people, especially teens, embed objects in their bodies. More »
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For the past few days, university students in the Southern Chinese resort town of Hainan have been quarantined on the grounds of the Hainan University campus with little food or water. Apparently there's been an outbreak of cholera, and the local officials dealt with it Resident Evil style: Lock everybody in, give them no information, and see if they survive. But one woman student has been blogging about the ongoing ordeal, posting pictures and giving status updates several times a day. More »
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Your next kiss could turn into an infection that eats your lips off. San Francisco and Boston are reporting outbreaks of drug-resistant staph bacteria that cannot be stopped with any antibiotics currently being used to fight them. When the bacteria come into contact with your skin, they can burrow into tiny cuts and create infections so severe that it's as if the microbes are eating your flesh. The staph is transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, especially sexual contact. Right now, it's hitting mostly gay communities but researchers warn it's about to jump into the mainstream population. More »
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