OVERLOOKED NEWS ON HEALTH-RELATED SCIENCE

One Health 2024-2026

This blog was initiated in Hong Kong in year 2000 at the HKU-Pasteur Research Centre Ltd, a joint venture between the University of Hong Kong and the Institut Pasteur established by Antoine Danchin and now dismantled. It was pursued at the Paris Unit Genetics of Bacterial Genomes with the aim to help finding knowledge on health-related overlooked topics. Note that, to understand biology, you must be able to write or talk about biological facts and concepts. Several pages at this site are devoted to genomics, but broader information can be found in The Delphic Boat (2003, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, USA) and in the popular articles cited as needed. Our own scientific publications can be used to communicate basic or highly specialized knowledge.

The present blog does not compete with information provided by news agencies such as Agence France Presse or Reuters but selects information occasionally not discovered by the mainstream media. It also provides some information on the History of Science and the creation of concepts used by modern biology. Access to the very nature of Science is discussed in a lecture given at Zhong Shan University (中山大學) in Guangzhou (广州). You can also follow our E-seminar for ongoing open discussions (registering is requested). Finally, the importance of China is stressed as an often enigmatic actor of the world development.

Unlike 25 years ago, when little information was available on line, there are now a multitude of data sources. Remember however that the WWW is not stable and that anonymous texts should be considered dubious unless independently checked for validity. Many links disappear. Not all important information is in English! Look for information in other languages. Chinese, as Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua 普通话), is spoken by the largest number of people, followed by Latin languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish...), and then by English (or perhaps languages of India). Greek provides most of the words and concepts used in the sciences.

The Center for Infectious Disease Research Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota and the World Health Organization (WHO) sites are major sources of information. Many sites provide interesting information on seasonal flu (especially type A H3N2), avian flu (H5N1) and swine flu A (H1N1). In general, new emerging pathogens are mainly viruses. Note that among the possible outbreaks that would have negative consequences (much more so than the COVID-19 episode, which may be relatively mild, but would have negative consequences as it progresses) are influenza outbreaks, especially those related to the H2N2 serotype, which could be much more deadly. Hopefully, unlike SARS, the current outbreak will have served as a lesson.

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2026

	11 October 2026. Hong Kong has recorded 70 per cent of this year’s total of mpox since August. AI and mathematics. The latest mpox case in Hong Kong brought the total number recorded in Hong Kong this year to 30, comprising 23 local cases and seven imported ones. This makes vaccination essential. AI keeps solving mathematical conjectures, placing the whole field in jeopardy.
	3 October 2026. For a couple of years a epidemic of rabies is spreading among marine mammals in South Africa. Rabies is transmitted between mammals through saliva, usually from a bite or scratch from an infected animal. This viral disease has long been a common plague in Europe and the invention of a vaccine by Pasteur contributed to his notoriety. Until this episode marine mammals had not been known to transmit the disease. Infected animals become aggressive and tend to bite their congeners, so that we do not know whether the epidemic can be stopped.
	19 September 2026. The yield of rice crops is expected to increase in the years to come. Rice is a major staple crop. It is obtained from a number of varieties with different yield, resistance to disease or adaptation to climate change. The genus Oryza has two major species, one from Asia (O. sativa) and one from Africa (O. glaberrima). African rice tolerates high temperature, drought and poor soils, and it is resistant to pests and diseases. However it has a low yield. The Asian species can be cultivated at a high yield but is very fragile. It would be useful to be able to generate hybrids which would combine both general traits. Unfortunately this has systematically ended in sterile plants. A team led by Wan Jianmin at Nanjing Agricultural University’s State Key Laboratory for Crop Genetics and Germplasm Enhancement and Utilisation has succeeded in identifying the genes responsible for sterility in crossbreeds and this will be used to overcome this hurdle, hopefully producing a new variety which will combine the positive traits of both Asian and African rice varieties.
	19 May 2026. As fears of hantaviruses subside, an Ebola outbreak is spreading across Central Africa, but it is the Nipah virus that should be of greater concern at this time. A new strain of the Ebola virus has prompted a serious warning from the WHO. Transmission of this virus, however, requires direct contact with infected patients, which fortunately limits the likelihood of a major outbreak, despite traditional practices that involve physical contact to comfort patients. Nipah virus infections are repeatedly identified in India, which systematically triggers screenings at Chinese airports. This virus, made famous by the horror film Contagion, is transmitted through the feces and urine of fruit bats, but pigs are also a possible host. The overall health risk remains very low, but appropriate surveillance is necessary.
	11 May 2026. The pulmonary form of hantavirus is far more dangerous than the hemorrhagic form. The first cases that led to the identification of a hantavirus, during the Korean War in the Hantan River basin, were characterized by hemorrhagic fever. Viral strains related to this particular family are widespread in the Far East and in Europe, from Greece to Finland. More recently, a family with respiratory tropism has been identified in the Americas. Every year, sporadic cases appear from the northern to the southern parts of the American continent. A prime example is the Sin Nombre (“Nameless”) virus, frequently encountered from Canada to California, where its host, the mouse Peromyscus maniculatus, is widespread. As is often the case, the tropism of viruses can change; for example, there is a form of the Sin Nombre virus that caused fulminant pneumonia in the United States in 1999. Hantavirus infections are rare, but an outbreak in France in 1996 resulted in 230 cases of infection. In this blog, we have regularly recorded outbreaks caused by hantaviruses, particularly several outbreaks in Western Europe in 2005 that resulted in more than 500 infections. In almost all cases, transmission was traced to direct or indirect contact (inhalation of dust) with the droppings of infected rodents, in which the virus remains asymptomatic but persistent. However, a particular strain (Andes) that emerged in Chile appeared to have been transmitted between people. Explicit evidence of person-to-person transmission was provided in Argentina, where an outbreak of 29 cases, including 11 fatalities, was identified in the village of Epuyén in Patagonia. It goes without saying that the inherently confined environment of a cruise ship is particularly conducive to transmission, as demonstrated by the outbreak on the Hondius. As long as the total number of infections remains limited, it is reasonable to assume that the epidemic will remain contained. However, the likelihood of a shift in the mode of transmission increases with the size of the affected population, particularly in the case of respiratory infections. This requires health authorities to take drastic measures to isolate patients for as long as necessary.
	6 May 2026. The world population is flooded with news about a hantavirus infection aboard a cruise ship. While we did not plan to report on the hantavirus infection aboard the Hondius cruise ship returning from Argentina (where the virus is known to be endemic) now anchored off Cape Verde, the fear which is spreading worldwide deserves a comment. The reason is that the particular strain of the virus is known to display person to person (P2P) contamination and that this has apparently happened in this incident, with at least eight persons infected. Furthermore the virus is particularly dangerous because its incubation time is long, reaching sometimes two months, so that asymptomatic person may, long after disembarking, transmit the disease.
	2 May 2026. Despite prevalent views about the origin of COVID-19 the question will probably be again in the limelight. The existence of a controversial research programme on coronaviruses involving a collaboration between the USA and China came to the fore when COVID-19 began to spread, in particular because it appeared in Wuhan, precisely the city where the programme was to be developed. Now David Morens, a former Senior National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) official is indicted for concealing federal records during COVID-19 Pandemic. These records pertain to a NIH grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence (bat coronavirus grant), based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China. Indeed if the planned work, involving Peter Daszak, has been pursued, it would illustrate the development of a potentially dangerous "gain of function" experiment involving coronaviruses. In the indictment it is also written that NIAID awarded the grant to unnamed "Company #1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This happens at a time when the choices of people in charge of Health by the Trump administration are highly controversial and we should expect that this will not settle the matter of the origins of the virus.
	30 April 2026. The genome maverick Craig Venter passed away.Craig Venter was a controversial figure, but his contribution to genome studies is considerable. His laboratory was the first to transplant a whole genome isolated in vitro to a foreign recipient cell, paving the way for the development of synthetic biology. This is a far cry from synthesising life, despite claims to the contrary. Based on his—and others—inextinguishable quest for notoriety, his work generated a considerable amount of spurious and dangerous claims, such as, recently, the wrong and deeply irrational idea that creating a life where all the components had a mirror symmetry of those in existing life would be dangerous. This "mirrorgate" is a very unfortunate pendent of the infamous CIA "Stargate Project" based on parapsychology which plagued the USA in the late-seventies.
	20 April 2026. A century-old observation revived as a key to understand the reproduction of mitochondria. News about epidemic diseases of animals and people kept spreading in 2025 and this has been monitored by the mass media, making further information redundant. This gives us the opportunity to return to science and some unexpected interesting discoveries. Among the diseases which do not result from pathogens, many are associated with a tiny organelle of our cells, mitochondria. These essential organelles have been discovered at the end of the XIXth and beginning of the XXth centuries. They control the respiration of animal cells and the associated energy production. Because they have their own autonomous genome, a critical question is how this genome is transmitted to the daughter cells when cells divide. In yet another example of research developed by husband and wife, Margaret Reed Lewis, who was one of the very first person able o culture animal cells in vitro and her husband Warren Lewis, while confirming the existence of microbe-like organelles in cells observed repeatedly that they formed pearls within the host cell before dividing. This process of "pearling" has now been shown by scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Swizerland to be caused by a highly organised phase transition that is critical to ensure proper distribution of the mitochondrial genome when cells divide.