A total of eight people have now died following exposure to H7N9, a lethal new strain of bird flu that by last count had infected at least 24 people. Concern, expressed by epidemiologists and felt by people around the world, is prudent and warranted. Panic, and the rhetoric that comes with it, is not.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed tonight that a terrifying meningitis outbreak that has claimed 20 lives was caused by steroid shots for back pain. The shots, manufactured by NECC, were tainted with a form of fungus that attacks the nervous system. Because many of these shots were…

The United States is in the middle of its worst whooping cough (aka pertussis) outbreak in over half a century, but few states have been hit as hard as Washington. This graph, released just a few days ago by the CDC, compares the state's pertussis cases in 2012 against those documented in 2011 — and the difference is…

When humans travel, diseases travel with them. Events like the 2003 SARS outbreak and 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic have revealed the role that air travel plays in the spread of illness on a global scale. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a computer simulation that suggests which U.S. airports are most likely to…

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…

We already have many of the medicines we need to kill pandemic diseases. But to stop a pandemic itself, we need math.

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."

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?

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?