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Tag: infectious disease

How many people has COVID-19 really killed in the U.S.?

Posted September 26, 2020 by Evan Arnet

A silhouette of a young man wearing a white mask is superimposed over the American flag.

In late August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their provisional death counts page to indicate that COVID-19 was the sole cause of death listed on death certificates in only 6% of cases. This fact was interpreted by some as only 6% of reported fatalities, or around 10,000 people, actually died of… Read more »

COVID-19 at IU and the importance of waiting for the evidence

Posted September 19, 2020 by Evan Arnet

Before classes had even started this semester, pictures of student parties began to circulate on social media. A college experience had been promised, but not everyone read the fine print about the degree of isolation and social distancing that would be required. The reactions ranged from indifference, to abject horror, to finger wagging, to smug… Read more »

COVID-19 lockdown: Some good news for the environment

Posted June 27, 2020 by Vaishnavi Muralikrishnan

[smoggy vs clear photo of an arch in Delhi, India]

Since the coronavirus outbreak, many of us had to shelter-in-place or practice social distancing. For some of us, this meant working from home, and for others, it meant traveling to their workplace fewer days of the week. Either way, people commuting less to work can mean many different things: fewer cars on the streets, fewer factories, office and school buildings utilizing electricity. Though all these sound like a massive disruption of plans, there is a silver lining to it: the positive impact the lockdown has on the environment…

COVID–19: What is it? What you should know about it?

Posted April 4, 2020 by Haley Jordan

[Coronavirus is a spherical virus with small suction-cup-like attachments on the surface.]

Obviously, we have all heard about COVID–19, the novel coronavirus outbreak that originated at a seafood market in Wuhan China. There is a LOT of information out there about COVID–19 but there are also still many open questions that we are desperately looking for answers to. I wanted to tackle this topic from a scientific approach, so what exactly is COVID–19? The Coronavirus family is characterized as an enveloped positive strand RNA virus, much like the SARS-coronavirus that infected people in 2003, but with a slightly different genome. What does that mean? Let’s break it down…

Employing wheat’s bacterial partners to fight a pathogen: An internship experience

Posted August 23, 2018 by Briana K. Whitaker

This post is from the US Department of Agriculture’s blog. It was originally published on August 7, 2018, and has been lightly edited with a short introduction on internship experiences for graduate students. Internships in graduate school can be a fantastic experience. They can expose you to a completely new way to do science outside… Read more »

Antibiotic resistance: Real concern or fake news?

Posted February 27, 2018 by Guest Contributor

Cylindrical bacterial cells are shown in blue against a black background

The author is ScIU guest writer Krystiana Krupa, a graduate student in IU’s Department of Anthropology. So let’s talk about these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, otherwise known as superbugs. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are bacteria that cannot be killed by pharmaceutical drugs that would normally be effective. While many of us know that superbugs exist and are becoming more problematic (think… Read more »

Who’s eating who? Predators that cause disease epidemics & Predators that improve human health

Posted August 8, 2017 by Briana K. Whitaker

A women sits in a blue boat (kayak) holding a double-sided paddle in the middle of a lake. Trees and cloudy background.

Pathogens and parasites are the hidden players of many of nature’s most bizarre and beautiful patterns and processes. For example, the extraordinary levels of plant animal biodiversity we find in the tropics is thought to be due, at least in part to the high levels of disease and natural enemies we find in those environments…. Read more »

Safety in diversity?

Posted September 6, 2016 by Amrita Bhattacharya

Disease epidemics can be devastating. How can the spread of infectious disease be controlled? It is believed that more genetically diverse host populations have lower prevalence of infectious diseases. This pattern is particularly strong in agricultural systems where diverse mixtures of crops are less susceptible to epidemics than single species (the “monoculture effect”). But how… Read more »

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