In a new study published in Nature Immunology, researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital demonstrated that pairing the original COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with an immune system enhancer, known as an adjuvant, improved the duration of the vaccine’s protection in mice. The combo also showed a more pronounced response against omicron viral components than the vaccine alone. The researchers say that introducing adjuvants like this one to mRNA vaccines may alleviate the need for frequent boosters due to waning antibodies or new viral variants.

A large-scale study of human mobility and wildlife movement across the United States suggests that the day-to-day presence of humans – not just how they alter the landscape – is a major ecological force that shapes how animals move through and use their environments, researchers report. Human activity is accelerating global biodiversity loss by transforming climates and rapidly reshaping natural landscapes. Yet beyond these physical alterations of the environment, there is a growing recognition that the direct presence of humans themselves may greatly influence how animals behave, including how they perceive risk, move through their habitats, compete for resources, and interact with other species. Despite this, large-scale comparative research has rarely examined human presence as a distinct and dynamic pressure on wildlife, largely due to the fact that detailed data on where and when people move are difficult to obtain. Most existing studies have focused on local settings or broad proxies of human presence, such as pandemic-related lockdowns, and have concentrated largely on mammals. As a result, relatively little is known about how interacting forms of human activity and presence combine to affect wildlife.

 

To address this gap, Ruth Oliver and colleagues combined data on numbers of mobile devices and vehicles in each U.S. census block as a measure of human presence, along with detailed measures of human landscape modification, with animal tracking data from more than 4,500 birds and mammals representing 37 species. By centering their study on the years 2019 and 2020 and leveraging the unique, temporary decline of human movement in modified landscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic, Oliver et al. were able to disentangle the direct effects of human activity from the broader impacts of landscape change and evaluate how each factor influenced the amount of space animals used. According to the findings, direct human presence influenced the movement patterns or use of the environment of 65% of species examined. Many mammals reduced the amount of territory they used in response to greater human activity, particularly in less-developed habitats where animals may perceive humans as a threat. On the other hand, some species, like gray wolves, expanded their ranges, likely to better avoid people. Adaptable species such as white-tailed deer appeared more comfortable incorporating human-modified environments into their usable habitats. Birds likewise showed highly variable responses, with some species becoming more spatially constrained and others altering their habitat use depending on the surrounding degree of development. In a related Perspective, Lydia Beaudrot discusses the study and its findings in greater detail.

A PLOS Medicine analysis led by Fred Hutch Cancer Center researchers quantified the enduring impact that China’s health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic had on overall healthcare utilization. As the first country to report COVID-19 cases and implement infection control measures, and among the last to lift such policies, China’s experience presented a unique opportunity to study the relationship between public health measures and healthcare access.

Anti-Asian discrimination and violence increased during COVID, and new research from Murdoch University has revealed one key psychological driver.

Scientists, including Rutgers Health researchers, say studies of chronic symptoms after infections have been undermined by unproven diagnoses.

About The Study: In this cohort study, recent COVID-19 vaccination was associated with a reduced risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. These findings suggest that COVID-19 vaccination may have an indirect benefit of decreasing transmission and thus reducing overall exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

Researchers at Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a mechanism that may help explain a key reason why older people experience worse outcomes from breast cancer. A key aspect of the study benefited from timing and chance. During COVID, because of reduced laboratory activity, some of the research team’s mouse colonies aged longer than originally planned. This created a rare opportunity to study cancer in these older animals, which is normally a difficult and expensive endeavor. Serendipitously, the opportunity gave the scientists the ability to directly compare how tumors behave in younger versus older mice.

(Boston)—Superspreading became a familiar concept to many during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior studies examining infectious disease epidemics, including those on COVID-19, have found that some individuals are much more likely to transmit infections to other people. Superspreading, when one person with an infection passes it to an unusually large number of other people, is a key feature of tuberculosis (TB) epidemiology. Most individuals with TB, the disease caused by infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, cause very few secondary infections, and often cause no secondary infections at all. However, many studies, including groundbreaking studies in the 1950s and 1960s examining TB transmission observed that some individuals with TB are more highly infectious and cause many more secondary infections among their contacts. As a result, the overall impact on future transmission of diagnosing someone with TB and treating them with antibiotics (typically making them non-infectious within 1-2 weeks) can vary widely from person to person.

In a new perspective piece in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian and the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine examine both historical and contemporary evidence in M. tuberculosis superspreading. They argue it represents not only a critical challenge for global TB control, but also a potential opportunity for innovative prevention strategies. The authors introduce the idea of "superspreading niches", specific parts of community contact networks where highly infectious individuals intersect with highly susceptible contacts, as a key framework for understanding TB superspreading and designing new TB control interventions.

Tracking the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, rather than just viral abundance, dramatically improves the ability to monitor and predict COVID-19 outbreaks, researchers report. Their study suggests that the new approach to wastewater pathogen surveillance could serve as a powerful predictive tool for public health, providing earlier and more accurate insight into emerging waves of infection. Monitoring pathogens in wastewater has become a powerful public health tool since the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a fast, cost-efficient, and potentially less biased way to track infectious diseases across scales. Because wastewater collects biological material from an entire population, a single sample can provide a broad snapshot of community-wide infection dynamics. Yet the standard methods used to estimate disease prevalence, which rely on measuring the amount of viral genetic material recovered from a given volume of wastewater, are vulnerable to limitations. Some measurements cannot be meaningfully compared across different pathogens or settings, while others are easily distorted by environmental factors like rainfall. According to Dustin Hill and colleagues, analyzing pathogen genetic diversity through whole-genome sequencing has the potential to overcome several of the limitations of traditional wastewater surveillance methods. They argue that changes in viral genetic diversity itself may serve as a meaningful indicator of shifts in disease spread within a population.

 

Here, Hill et al. introduce and validate a method for estimating the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 by analyzing the virus’s genetic diversity in wastewater. To evaluate this idea, Hill et al. retroactively applied and analyzed genetic diversity within SARS-CoV-2 from 12,290 wastewater samples collected between 2023 and 2025 from across New York state. They found that genetic diversity within a specific region of the viruses’ spike protein – the S1 NTD region – closely tracked real-world COVID-19 infection trends and, in many cases, correlated with disease activity more strongly than traditional wastewater metrics. Moreover, the authors’ statistical analyses revealed that diversity patterns in wastewater consistently preceded increases in COVID-related hospital admissions by one to two weeks, suggesting robust early warning signals of worsening disease spread. “The use of wastewater surveillance as a primary tool for monitoring population health is still a developing area,” write Justin Lessle and Ariel Christensen in a related Perspective. “Nevertheless, [this approach] has the potential to revolutionize infectious disease research and public health practice. Viral sequencing approaches such as that proposed by Hill et al. will be an important component of that success.”