When public health researchers want to know whether diseases such as COVID-19 or polio are circulating in a community, they can look for genetic evidence in wastewater.

Entomologist Dana Price wondered whether the same principle could be applied to mosquitoes. The question led to an unconventional experiment.

“What we did, colloquially, was build a mosquito toilet,” said Price, an associate professor at the Center for Vector Biology, Department of Entomology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and a lead author of a study published in Microbiology Spectrum.

New study finds that widespread underreporting of Covid-19 deaths cannot be explained simply by differences in countries’ ability to count and record deaths. Across 134 countries and territories, an estimated 45%–55% of governments misreported Covid mortality, with underreporting far more common than overreporting. The study provides comparable country-level data of the extent of misinformation for researchers and policymakers. The findings point to a broader lesson beyond the pandemic: strong institutions and an informed public can play an important role in protecting the reliability of official information.

A comprehensive in silico scan of human respiratory viruses identified 3CLpro cleavage motifs within influenza NP and PA. Experimental validation confirmed that 3CLpro-mediated cleavage triggers rapid protein degradation and cytoplasmic mislocalization. Consequently, both ectopic 3CLpro expression and SARS-CoV-2 replication effectively inhibit replication across diverse influenza virus strains, revealing a broad-spectrum antiviral mechanism.

More than two-thirds of hospitalized COVID-19 survivors maintained stable cognition 2 years after Omicron infection, while one in five experienced reversible decline. Researchers report that only 10.8% developed irreversible cognitive decline, including 3.6% with progressive decline. Older age, reinfection, severe illness, hypertension, longer hospitalization, and white matter lesions increased the risk, while education and vaccination were protective. Findings highlight potential for cognitive recovery, supporting monitoring of patients at higher risk of progressive decline.

Inspired by the work of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at UMass Chan Medical School and the development of the COVID vaccine, UMass Chan scientistis Marcus Ruscetti, PhD, and Chaitanya Naimesh Parikh, PhD’26, have developed an immunotherapy using a cocktail of messenger RNAs (mRNA) that could potentially be transformative for pancreatic cancer treatment.