This is one of the saddest pieces I’ve read in a long time; brace yourself, it’s devastating
I wish RFK Jr and his MAHA movement would read it (they won’t)
🎁 Link
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/o...
Choice words from Dr. Szostak here.
And while I am no Nobel Prize-winning scientist, I identify with the same quandary as an immigrant, moving here in 2009 and (proudly) becoming a citizen in 2023.
I, too, don't recognize that country anymore 😢🇺🇸🧳🛫.
newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...
Since I'm getting a questions about the new data - a few _preliminary_ comments:
1️⃣ Are the outbreaks in the US connected?
👉 Very likely.
2️⃣ Does this mean US will lose elimination status?
👉 Yes, but that's been clear for a while.
Data: nextstrain.org/measles/geno...
A few details + caveats 🧵👇
Every story has a quote left on the cutting room floor.
For this one, it's this:
Me: The U.S. has sequenced 1000 measles genomes from our outbreak.
Virologist @eddieholmes.bsky.social: "This is 2026! There shouldn't be 1000 measles genomes. That's disastrous."
kffhealthnews.org/news/article...
A new study in Nature Microbiology reveals that an eye condition called POH-VAU (persistent ocular hypertensive viral anterior uveitis) is caused by covert mortality nodavirus (CMNV) - a virus that's been devastating shrimp farms for over a decade.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Join us tomorrow!
Proud to work with a unified scientific community to show up to a debate with evidence rather than insinuations.
If we are going to rebuild trust in NIH, we better make sure the NIH Director is telling the truth
#NIHFFS
The NIH's 2026 budget is $49 billion. WIC is $7 billion. PEPFAR was $7 billion. Budgets are statements of values.
"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role"
arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 (preprint)
Here is a graph with dollar amounts of funding committed.
The curves look very similar to those based on the number of awards.
The vast majority of labs in the U.S. rely on federal funding to do their research - labs like my own.
We're already running on fumes and while top-line budgets have been maintained, for now, research isn't getting funded.
Once those fumes are out 👉 🪦.
elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/i-wrote-re...
If overheads could be used for these costs, that'd be a huge help (though I'm not aware of too many institutions that allow it?). Grants will undoubtedly still be the main source of funding for most labs, so while not perfect, it'd be a pretty great option where possible!
There's a common misconception that zoonotic viruses require significant adaptation to jump from animals to cause human epidemics.
Not so 👇.
Further, we see clear signs of 1977 flu experiencing cell passage, prior to epidemic.
SARS-CoV-2? Business as usual.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Measles continues to spread across the Americas. Utah is reporting several hospitalizations amid an outbreak that’s grown to 358 cases. Meanwhile, Mexico is reporting 6,387 cases in 2026—nearly the same amount that it reported in all of 2025.
Oh nice! Thanks Niema!
This is a great place to start - unfortunately EOSS hasn't been active for a while, hoping for another RFP cycle soon! The Sloan foundation also looks like an interesting one... indirect cost rates are always a hurdle though, and tend to be disqualifying for a lot of these.
Interesting, thanks for the suggestion! Do you envision direct community funding through something like GitHub sponsors or Patreon? Not sure this would work in an academic environment. Or perhaps some other community-driven funding approach?
There's some more "sustainable" models to fund ongoing development and application, like Genome Detective (www.genomedetective.com), but if tools aren't open-source (esp. if $$$ required to use them), they won't be available to the researchers, public health scientists, and companies that need them
Open question for anyone that develops/maintains of bioinformatics tools, especially those used for public health - what do you think is the right way to fund this long term?
Grants are great for new research directions, but aren't really appropriate for most tool dev/maintenance.
The point is to destroy the administrative state, centers of knowledge and all civic institutions that stand in the way of Russell Vought’s vision of an authoritarian theocracy. It sounds insane and something out of Atwood. But this is where we are. Under his eye.
This week's cover @thelancet.com
Federal funding for US biomedical research is moribund.
Since October 1 2025, NIH is -80% in new grants and -70% in values (total dollars).
Labs are closing down and researchers are leaving science.
To what end?
This was a huge team effort across NICD, University of Birmingham, and Scripps. Lots of exciting wastewater surveillance work from our team to come!
And here's another link to the preprint :) www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
Together, it's clear wastewater-integrated whole-genome surveillance can:
1. Expand coverage
2. Improve lineage/genotype tracking
3. Reveal hidden transmission
4. Support elimination programs
while using scalable, low-cost approaches (and not only for measles!)
Perhaps most importantly, we compared our results with a standard N450 sequencing approach, and found that whole genome sequencing more accurately recovered country-specific clustering, transmission links, and overall better represented evolutionary dynamics.
We also found three distinct D8 genotype outbreak clusters, again identifying new potential transmission links.
Because samples had so little virus diversity, we were able to recover sequences directly from wastewater and incorporate them into our phylogenetic analyses. This identified one large genotype B3 clade, that shows ongoing transmission in Gauteng and interprovincial spread.
We then investigated measles spread and timing across multiple scales in Gauteng province, including WWTPs to "upstream" sub-catchments, markedly increasing the available resolution and population coverage of measles surveillance
To investigate the specific measles genotypes driving the detected outbreaks, we turned to whole-genome sequencing and performed analyses using our Freyja tool.
We found that most wastewater samples were not mixtures of genotypes, but genotype prevalence estimates closely tracked clinical.
