Screwworm, ebola, and still the measles. June 6th, 2026

The Boston Globe - A small group of ‘superdodgers’ insist they’ve never had COVID. Here’s why they may be wrong. By Sarah Rahal Updated June 3, 2026, 5:30 a.m. Last month, The Boston Globe asked readers who believe they’ve never caught the coronavirus to share their experiences. The response was overwhelming. More than 500 people wrote in, many offering to sign up for clinical trials, convinced their stories might help researchers uncover why some people appear to have evaded the pandemic. In fact, researchers are already working to answer that question. Their most definitive finding so far: NOVIDs are exceedingly rare. “There’s a difference between people who believe they’ve never had COVID and those who truly haven’t,” said Dr. Sabrina Assoumou, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and a researcher at Boston University. Data suggest only about 2 to 3 percent of people have no COVID antibodies worldwide, meaning they may never have been infected, Assoumou said. Even that may be an overestimate, since most people who feel like outliers likely had asymptomatic or mild infections that went undetected. But the possibility that a tiny fraction truly escaped infection has intrigued researchers. They formed an international consortium of 250 scientists, known as the COVID Human Genetic Effort, who are hunting for an even smaller group: people with genetic variants that may make them resistant to the virus.

We’ve known about asymptomatic covid since the get go of the pandemic, because that’s how the spread was so diabolical. So it’s true there are probably many cases where people have no idea they had covid. All you have to do is look at the amount of people who just assume they have a really really really bad cold, or the flu, without even bothering to test. I hear that all the time from podcasters, pundits, and other content creators. We also know that there could be things that make people more or less likely to be resistant to other things, like HIV, for example. I remember decades ago being riveted by a PBS NOVA episode about Stephen Cohn. But of course there are also people such as myself who have never been sick with covid and never tested positive for covid. I even had an antibody test a month or two after a known exposure in March 2020, and that was negative. I’ve not even had an actual cold-like illness since January 2020. And even so, I couldn’t say for sure. In my case, avoiding covid is likely a mix of luck and because I actually take precautions. I say it’s a mix of luck because I do in fact likely get exposed from time to time, at dental or medical appointments, for example, though I request healthcare providers to mask when I’m having to unmask, and my dentist, who masked prior to the pandemic because he doesn’t want to breathe in tooth dust, canceled when he had cold symptoms. I do think there are probably more people avoiding covid, at least to some extent, than people realize. There’s been marketing research all along that has showed that behaviour patterns remained shifted even after the push to get back to normal for The Economy. The reason that it’s not so obvious is in my opinion a damning one; it’s because it’s largely groups that are already ignored and marginalized otherwise as well: the elderly & disabled.

News-Medical.Net - Older adults’ social patterns shift post-pandemic, study finds Apr 10 2024 In one paper published in February in the journal Wellbeing, Space and Society, 60% of respondents said they spend more time in their home while 75% said they dine out less. Some 62% said they visit cultural and arts venues less, and more than half said they attend church or the gym less than before the pandemic.While that survey was taken two years ago, the most recent survey taken in spring 2023 showed similar trends, with more than half of respondents still reporting that their socialization and entertainment routines were different than they were pre-pandemic. In another paper titled “I just can’t go back,” 80% of respondents reported that there are some places they are reluctant to visit in person anymore. “The thought of going inside a gym with lots of people breathing heavily and sweating is not something I can see myself ever doing again,” said one 72-year-old male.

The Philadelphia Inquirer - Ten more measles cases are reported in ongoing central Pa. outbreak So far in 2026, Pennsylvania has seen 50 cases of measles - 38 linked to an ongoing outbreak in Lancaster and three nearby counties. The state saw 16 cases of measles in all of last year. by Aubrey Whelan Published June 4, 2026, 4:40 p.m. ET All measles cases detected in the state this year involved residents who either were not fully vaccinated against measles or whose vaccination status was unknown, officials said. Measles is highly contagious and can infect nine out of 10 unvaccinated people who come into contact with the virus, which can linger in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves an area. The virus’ early symptoms include a fever, cough, runny nose, red and puffy eyes, and a rash. In serious cases, measles can lead to pneumonia, brain infections, and death. The current outbreak began in Lebanon County in late April, when three patients were treated for measles at area hospitals. Contact tracing later identified several more cases. Last week, state officials warned that anyone who had visited a Kohl’s store in Lancaster on May 21, 23, 25, or 26 could have been exposed to measles. The company confirmed to LancasterOnline that an employee there had been infected.

Fall in official Ebola numbers appears to be good news but it's not that simple Fergus Walsh Medical editor BBC The latest Ebola figures from the Democratic Republic of Congo appear to offer some hope after the number of cases was dramatically scaled back. At one point the authorities were talking of more than 1,000 suspected cases and nearly 250 suspected deaths. They are now reporting around 380 confirmed cases in DR Congo, including 60 deaths, plus another 15 confirmed cases and one death in neighbouring Uganda. However, the key difference is that the authorities are now talking about confirmed, rather than suspected, cases as before. So it would be a mistake to assume that the fall in numbers means the outbreak is suddenly less dangerous. The decline reflects better data, as laboratories were able to rule out many patients who had fever but were suffering from other conditions such as malaria which is common in DR Congo. The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said the outbreak had a "big head start" but response teams are now "catching up".

The U.S. Government’s Screwworm Screw-Up An unwanted lesson in good governance. Robinson Meyer • 06/04/2026 HEATMAP For decades, the United States government paid to breed millions of male screwworms, blast them with radiation to make them sterile, and then drop them from planes into the rainforest at the narrowest stretch of the Panama peninsula. (Sarah Zhang, the bravura science writer at The Atlantic, wrote the ultimate story about this project back in 2020, which is how I learned about it in the first place.) These sterile male worms mate with female screwworms but produce no larvae, creating a biological border in Central America across which screwworms cannot pass, at least in theory. That border was breached in 2022 — perhaps via infected livestock smuggled across the Darién Gap — and since then screwworms have been inching toward Mexico and the United States. They were hundreds of miles from the border last summer; now they seem to have crossed it. Once they’re inside the country, the screwworms will be difficult to cordon given that livestock move travel regularly as they move from ranch to slaughterhouse. The U.S. government is on it — sort of. Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, announced efforts last July to open a new factory in Texas capable of producing 300 million sterile screwworms. Regardless, re-eradicating the worms is going to be much harder than keeping them under control — the U.S. established the bio-wall in that narrow strip of Panama because it was most efficient, but eliminating the bugs at first required enormous air drops across the southern United States and the entirety of Mexico. That will require a bigger bug factory. Screwworm isn’t the only historic pest that the American government has lost control of: Our measles eradication status is now also under review. New pests threaten, as well, such as the alpha-gal tick and Lyme disease.

Left on the bus? Left behind? Left politically?

I’m going to caution again about using shorthand terms and ambiguous labels, because not everyone agrees on what things mean, and when you use shorthand, or fail to break things down, there’s a danger that nobody knows what anyone else is talking about, even if they think they are.

For example I have zero interest in living in a big city, I like living in a little house surrounded by trees, in a neighborhood of modest houses, in walking distance to some woodland trails, within easy driving distance of a lake and a pond to kayak at, and within reasonable day trip distance of dozens of lakes, gamelands, forests, and parks. If I had to choose whether to move to a house in the countryside or a condo in the city, I’d choose the rural location every time. I grew up in a small town and a rural cottage on the river surrounded by woods and farmland in summers. I’m vigorously defensive of forests. Am I left or right because of this? You can’t possibly know that.

But I still often see people assume someone can’t be left because they don’t like the big city, or they must be left because they care about forests. But there’s a Republican candidate running local to me for a state government election on the platform of being anti-data center and is regularly posting on facebook quoting the parts about protecting the environment out of the Pennsylvania Constitution, while the PA Governor Josh Shapiro is pushing data centers including on-site polluting power generation to print crypto by burning tires and coal waste.

Stay away from shorthand and assumptions, and just state clearly what you think and how you feel, specifically. Especially when writing your reps.