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On March 3, an illegal bio lab was discovered in a believed-to-be vacant building in Reedley, California in Fresno County. City code enforcement stumbled upon the building in December 2022 when they discovered a garden hose running up into the building through a hole in the wall. In March, they obtained a warrant to inspect the property, and in April, the Fresno County Department of Public Health ordered an inspection of the facility. Investigators inspected the building that contained the lab in July and found a room used to make COVID-19 tests and pregnancy tests. They also found over 35...

Why would a COVID lab run by a shady Chinese company be operating in Reedly, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley? The lab, which was supposed to be an empty building, was discovered by Reedly city code enforcement officers when they saw a garden hose attached to the building and investigated.

Researchers from Kiel University in Germany examined the DNA and skeletal remains of 70 people who were buried in the community cemetery located in Lauchheim Mittelhofen, a town in what is now present-day Germany. All of the burials took place sometime during the Merovingian period (between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D.). The team discovered that more than 30% of the deceased had either hepatitis B(opens in new tab); parvovirus B19(opens in new tab) (which can lead to a rash); variola virus(opens in new tab) (the virus that causes smallpox); or Mycobacterium leprae (one of the two bacteria that causes...

Australian researchers have used current hepatitis B virus (HBV) genome sequences to deduce ancient human population movements into Australia, adding weight to the theory that the mainland Aboriginal population separated from other early humans at least 59 thousand years ago and possibly entered the country near the Tiwi Islands... Chronic HBV infection is endemic in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and is an important cause of morbidity and mortality due to liver disease and liver cancer. As part of caring for patients with hepatitis B infections in the CHARM study, the research team collected HBV samples from people...

A medieval child whose mummified body was thought to show the earliest known case of smallpox was really suffering from hepatitis, scientists say. DNA analysis of the 16th century remains, found in the Basilica of Saint Domenico Maggiore in Naples, revealed the child was infected with an ancient strain of the hepatitis B virus (HBV). The team believe their findings could help shed new light on the ancient origins of the disease which, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), kills 1.5 million people a year. Previous scientific analysis of the 16th century remains - which did not include DNA...

The liver of a child mummy preserved for 500 years still holds samples of the hepatitis B virus... Mark Spigelman of the Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem... is a paleo-epidemiologist, who studies ancient diseases found on mummified bodies to shed light on the modern forms of such illnesses. This is the first time hepatitis B has been spotted in a mummified body. In South Korea, 12 percent of the population are hepatitis carriers, more than double the world average. The virus, responsible for about 1 million deaths each year,...

A mummified child in Korea whose organs were relatively well preserved has produced the oldest full viral genome description. A liver biopsy of the mummy revealed a unique hepatitis B virus (HBV) known as a genotype C2 sequence, which is said to be common in Southeast Asia. The first discovery of hepatitis in a Korean mummy came in 2007. The new work provided more detailed analysis... Carbon 14 tests of the clothing of the mummy suggests that the boy lived around the 16th century during the Korean Joseon Dynasty. The viral DNA sequences recovered from the liver biopsy enabled the...

You knew the first one to get married would be a Navy guy. At least you did if you had ever been in the Army. Or had heard the Village People song. At the stroke of midnight yesterday, it became OK to be queer in the military. And across America, newscast after newscast carried the water of the gay-rights movement. We saw repeated pictures of clean-cut men kissing, and heard any number of past and present military homosexuals talking about their moral victory, and there were sound bites of various generals and secretaries testifying that this was the right thing...

A former supervisor in the Dayton VA Medical Center’s dental clinic blamed intervention by the NAACP for foiling his efforts in the early 1990s to remove a dentist whose lax infection control practices put patients’ safety at risk. Dr. Dwight M. Pemberton continued to practice dentistry at the Dayton VA, often failing to change latex gloves and sterilize dental instruments between patients...Between 1992 and July 2010, 535 patients who had invasive dental work by Pemberton may have been exposed to bloodborne pathogens, the VA said. Nine have preliminary positive results for hepatitis B or hepatitis C. In the early 1990s,...

Enlarge Image Buried gem. Researchers have uncovered "fossil virus" inside the zebra finch genome. Credit: Peripitus/Wikimedia The hepatitis B virus and its ilk have been around for a long, long time. A newly uncovered "viral fossil" buried deep in the genome of the zebra finch indicates that the hepatitis B family of viruses—known as hepadnaviruses—originated at least 19 million years ago. Together with recent findings on other viruses, the work suggests that all viruses may be much older than thought. No one knows exactly where or when viruses originated. They don't leave fossils, so scientists have begun scouring the...

China 'has 120m hepatitis B carriers' By Shan Juan (China Daily) Updated: 2007-09-01 09:04 At least 120 million people in China have become carriers of the hepatitis B virus out of the 700 million people who once were infected with it, a senior health official said on Friday. Hao Yang, deputy director of the Ministry of Health's disease control and prevention bureau, revealed the figure at a ceremony unveiling a free hepatitis B vaccination project for 320,000 primary school students in northwest China's Qinghai Province. But he did not elaborate on details like major transmission channels and geographical distribution. "Prevention...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Findings from a study of Olympic wrestlers indicate that hepatitis B virus is found in the sweat of infected individuals, and so sweating might be a way that the virus could be passed between participants in contact sports. Bleeding wounds and mucous membranes have been implicated in hepatitis B transmission during contact sports, but until now no study had looked to see if sweat carries the virus. Dr. S. Bereket-Yucel, from Celal Bayar University in Izmir, Turkey, tested for DNA of the hepatitis B virus in blood and sweat samples from 70 male Olympic wrestlers....

  Girl gets $4.7M for vaccine injuries Friday, August 16, 2002 By LINDY WASHBURN Staff Writer A New Jersey girl whose mental development stopped at 2 months old after a routine immunization has received a $4.7 million settlement from a national trust fund.More than $3 million of the award will go to an annuity that will pay for the child's care as long as she lives. Its payout could exceed $61 million if she lives to 71, said Mindy Michaels Roth, the Glen Rock attorney who brought the case in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The payment to...