Measles Spread Threatens Canada’s Elimination Status as US Outbreaks Grow
South Carolina’s measles outbreak continues to grow, with two additional infections raising the statewide total to 25 cases. Officials say 22 cases stem from the Upstate cluster linked to exposures at two schools with high percentages of unvaccinated students, and the newest patients were already quarantining as known contacts. Rockland County, New York, has reported its second measles case in three months, unrelated to its earlier case and tied to recent international travel. Canada has now recorded more than 5,100 measles cases since fall 2024, marking a full year of uninterrupted transmission and threatening the country’s measles-elimination status, first declared in 1998. In Israel, officials reported an eighth pediatric death: a 2-year-old girl, unvaccinated. (CIDRAP)
Cigarette Butts Are Spreading Antibiotic Resistance, Scientists Warn
A new analysis of discarded cigarette filters suggests they’re more than ugly litter — they’re mobile reservoirs of drug-resistant bacteria. Researchers swabbed used butts collected from public streets and found they were colonized by microbes carrying hundreds of antibiotic-resistance genes, including genes that blunt last-resort drugs such as carbapenems. Many of those genes sit on mobile plasmids that can jump between bacteria, creating opportunities for resistance to spread into soil, waterways, or even onto people’s hands. Because cigarette filters are made of slow-to-degrade plastic fibers, they can sit in the environment leaching this “genetic pollution” for months. The team argues cigarette waste needs to be treated like regulated biohazard, not everyday trash. (CIDRAP)
West Nile Virus Claims First Death of 2025 in Los Angeles County
Los Angeles County health officials have reported the region’s first West Nile virus (WNV) death of 2025. The patient, who had underlying medical conditions, marks a grim milestone in what’s becoming an unusually active mosquito season. So far, officials have confirmed 169 WNV infections in the county this year; statewide, California has logged 318 human cases in 2025. Most people infected never feel sick, but severe neuroinvasive disease can trigger brain swelling, paralysis, and long-term disability, especially in older or medically fragile adults. Public health authorities urged residents to dump standing water, use EPA-registered mosquito repellent, wear long sleeves at dusk and dawn, and report dead birds — a classic WNV warning sign — because unseasonably warm fall weather is keeping mosquitoes active. (CIDRAP)
Ozempic-Style Drug Protects the Heart — Even If You Don’t Lose Much Weight
Semaglutide, the GLP-1 drug sold as Wegovy and Ozempic, cut major cardiac events — heart attack, stroke, or cardiovascular death — by about 20% in a massive international trial of 17,604 adults with existing heart disease and elevated weight. Crucially, the new analysis finds that benefit didn’t depend on how heavy people were at baseline, or how many pounds they shed. People with BMIs as low as 27 (roughly average in the UK) saw similar protection to people with severe obesity. Only shrinking waistlines — a proxy for visceral belly fat — explained about one-third of the effect. Researchers say the remaining two-thirds likely reflects direct cardiovascular actions: improving vessel lining health, lowering inflammation, blood pressure, and blood lipids. (UCL News)
Nighttime Light Is “Hell on Your Heart,” Says the Largest Study of Its Kind
Tracking 88,905 UK adults (40+ years old) for 9.5 years, researchers logged more than 13 million hours of objective light-exposure data from wrist-worn sensors. People who spent the overnight window (12:30–6:00 a.m.) in the brightest light had a 56% higher risk of heart failure and a 47% higher likelihood of heart attack than peers who slept in true darkness — even after accounting for exercise, diet, and genetics. Women and younger adults appeared especially vulnerable, hinting that circadian disruption at night may erode protections they’d normally have. The flip side: strong daytime light exposure looked cardioprotective, lowering heart failure and stroke risk before lifestyle adjustments. Authors want public-health guidance on nighttime lighting in homes, hospitals, and cities. (New Atlas)
Humans Hit a Hard Metabolic Ceiling — About 2.5× Resting Burn Rate
Ultra-endurance athletes can torch 7,000–8,000 calories a day during multi-day races, briefly revving to six or seven times their resting metabolic rate. But a new study of elite ultra-runners, cyclists, and triathletes finds the body cannot sustain that pace. Over weeks to months, energy burn always settles back to a “metabolic ceiling” of roughly 2.5 times basal metabolic rate. Push beyond that too long and the body starts cannibalizing its own tissues, essentially shrinking to survive. Researchers followed 14 highly trained competitors, dosing them with special “tracer” water to measure true energy expenditure and tracking them for up to 52 weeks. The work, published in Current Biology, argues biology — not willpower — ultimately caps human endurance. (SciTech Daily)
No, Your Body Doesn’t ‘Cancel Out’ Your Workout Later in the Day
A long-standing myth says exercise is mostly pointless for weight control because the body “compensates,” slowing other activity and burning fewer calories afterward. New research challenges that fatalism. Using objective metabolic measurements, scientists found that physically active people simply burn more total energy across the full day — and they don’t claw most of it back by flopping on the couch or dialing down basic biology. In other words, activity calories are largely additive, not neutralized. The authors say this undercuts the so-called “constrained energy model,” which argues our daily calorie burn is fixed. Instead, the data support exercise as a meaningful lever for weight management, metabolic health, and healthy aging, not just fitness bragging rights. (SciTech Daily)
Man Lives 9 Months With Gene-Edited Pig Kidney, Setting a Xenotransplant Record
A 67-year-old New Hampshire man, Tim Andrews, has become the longest-surviving recipient of a genetically engineered pig kidney. Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital implanted the organ in January 2025 using a donor pig altered with 69 CRISPR edits by biotech firm eGenesis to dial down rejection. Andrews had been on dialysis for more than two years and faced a long wait for a human kidney because of his rare blood type. The pig kidney functioned well enough to get him off dialysis for nearly nine months — far longer than previous recipients, who survived weeks to two months — before doctors removed it as performance declined. Researchers say the case is a milestone for easing the organ shortage affecting ~90,000 US kidney candidates. (WIRED)
Chatbots Are Quietly Becoming Front-Line Mental Health Triage
OpenAI says that hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users each week appear to be in some form of acute mental crisis — exhibiting delusional thinking, manic symptoms, or self-harm ideation. The company told WIRED it’s tuning GPT-5 to recognize and respond to those red flags more effectively, including steering people away from self-harm and toward urgent human help. That’s a massive, uncomfortable shift: consumer chatbots are acting like first responders for psychiatric risk, even though they’re not regulated as medical devices, can’t guarantee privacy, and aren’t guaranteed to de-escalate every crisis. Mental health researchers worry this creates a shadow mental health system driven by AI safety policies instead of clinical standards — but acknowledge it may already be saving lives. (WIRED)
Congress Poised to Squeeze Chinese Biotech Out of U.S. Research
U.S. lawmakers are moving to finalize the Biosecure Act, legislation that would bar federally funded agencies, universities, and contractors from using services or equipment from certain Chinese biotech firms. Supporters argue companies such as WuXi AppTec and BGI allow China to harvest Americans’ genomic and health data, creating national security and bioweapon risks. The latest version, now folded into the annual defense policy bill, empowers the White House to label “biotechnology companies of concern” and bans federal contracts that rely on them, directly or indirectly. Academic labs and drug developers warn the measure could sharply raise sequencing and manufacturing costs, delay new medicines, and force painful supply-chain divorces from Chinese partners that U.S. biomedicine currently depends on, potentially driving up drug prices for patients. (Science)
Rats Caught on Camera Snatching Bats Out of Midair in German Cave
For the first time, scientists have filmed brown rats hunting live bats in flight. Working at two bat hibernation sites in northern Germany, researchers used infrared cameras to watch invasive rats patrol cave entrances at night, stand upright on their hind legs, and grab passing Myotis bats out of the air. The rats then killed the bats with a bite and dragged the carcasses away. Across one site, cameras captured 30 hunting attempts and 13 confirmed kills. The team warns that even a few rats could remove thousands of bats from a single roost, threatening already stressed bat populations and potentially spreading bat-borne viruses to rats. The behavior underscores growing ecological pressure from invasive rats. (Science)