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West Africa

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International collaboration strengthens global disease surveillance

Increasingly researchers have used wastewater surveillance as an effective tool to find out what viruses and which strains of viruses—for example, SARS-CoV-2 variants—are circulating within a community. Providing real-time insights into which diseases might be on the rise helps public health officials to detect and contain outbreaks before they become global pandemics. In late Spring 2023, Scripps Research postdoctoral associates…
August 11, 2023
Press Releases

CViSB Center renewed with $12.8 million grant

Scientists at Scripps Research have received a significant grant to study the evolution and outcomes of human infections with SARS-CoV-2, Lassa virus and Ebola virus. The team will receive roughly $2.5 million each year for a maximum of five years, bringing the total potential award to $12.8 million. The funds—a grant renewal from the the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH)…
April 13, 2023
Lassa ecology mapPress ReleasesPublications

Lassa virus ecology study out in Nature Comms

New analysis by scientists at Scripps Research and University of Brussels finds that climate change and other factors could soon make deadly Lassa fever a much bigger public health problem in Africa. In the study, which appeared on September 27, 2022, in Nature Communications, scientists analyzed decades of environmental data associated with Lassa virus outbreaks, revealing temperature, rainfall and the presence…
October 3, 2022
Cell abstractPublications

Ebola paper in Cell

In a recent study published in Cell together with colleagues from UMass Worcester and the Broad, we show how a single mutation that occurred during the 2013-2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa increased the ability of the virus to infect human cells. The mutation occurred in the Ebola virus glycoprotein and is located in the receptor binding domain of…
November 22, 2016
Nature paperPublications

Review on Ebola evolution in Nature

The 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa was of unprecedented size and devastation, but also stands a landmark for infectious disease genomics. By sequencing virus genomes directly from patient samples, scientists are now able to investigate how viruses evolve, transmit between individuals, and spread across country borders during outbreaks, directly informing infection control. (more…)
October 12, 2016
Publications

Roots, Not Parachutes

Infectious disease outbreaks continue to pose challenges to global health and security, prompting reactive countermeasures. Recently, severe outbreaks of Ebola and Zika virus were designated by the World Health Organization as “Public Health Emergencies of International Concern.” Other emerging viral pathogens have warranted similar attention, including virus outbreaks from Lassa, Chikungunya, avian influenza, Nipah, SARS, and MERS. (more…)
June 30, 2016