Q: What is Nipah virus, and where did this outbreak come from? Nipah is a master of the “spillover”, when a pathogen that infects another species crosses over to infect humans. Its natural home is inside fruit bats (flying foxes), mostly in South and Southeast Asia. They carry the virus and shed it in saliva, urine, and feces. Humans typically get infected by consuming fruit or raw date palm sap contaminated with those secretions. Once it clears the species barrier, Nipah transmits between...

Bottom Line Up Front Poultry culling in the face of avian influenza involves the removal and euthanization of all birds in an infected...

Last Thursday morning, I rolled up my sleeve for a vaccine—or maybe it was just saline. I’ll probably never know. I'm volunteering in an...