Doctors Warn Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Are Returning: Doctors across the United States are reporting more cases of serious illnesses that vaccines had pushed into the background, including whooping cough, rotavirus, pneumonia, meningitis-linked bacterial infections, and even tetanus concerns. The trend follows a national measles resurgence and reflects falling vaccination rates, growing distrust, and expanding medical misinformation. Physicians describe unvaccinated children hospitalized for days with rotavirus, infants struggling to breathe after pertussis coughing fits, and toddlers with simultaneous bacterial infections that vaccines can help prevent. The consequences also extend beyond illness: emergency doctors may need spinal taps or stronger antibiotics for unvaccinated children with high fevers. Some parents are even refusing vitamin K shots for newborns, leading to severe bleeding cases. Doctors fear sporadic outbreaks could accelerate quickly. (New York Times)

DRC Weighs Mismatched Ebola Vaccines: Health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are weighing whether to use existing Ebola vaccines against a fast-growing outbreak caused by Bundibugyo virus, a rare Ebola species for which no licensed vaccine exists. The outbreak, detected in Ituri province two weeks ago, has reached 291 confirmed cases and 43 deaths, with spread to two other provinces and Uganda. WHO expert groups say evidence for using vaccines designed for Ebola Zaire or Sudan is weak and recommend deployment only in controlled trials, warning that failure could damage public confidence. Others argue that Ervebo or a Sudan-Zaire prime-boost strategy may be the fastest available option. New Bundibugyo-specific vaccines are being funded, but human testing is still months away. (Science)

Bangladesh Measles Outbreak Keeps Growing: Bangladesh reported more than 1,300 suspected measles cases and two deaths in a single day, pushing the outbreak total to nearly 71,000 infections and 585 fatalities since mid-March. Health officials say the situation remains severe, with almost 57,000 hospital admissions and fears of another surge after Eid al-Adha travel. Most victims are young children: roughly four in five patients are under age 5, the group most vulnerable to severe measles complications. Vaccination disruptions appear central to the crisis. Campaigns that had kept measles largely contained were interrupted in 2024, and an emergency effort launched in April has so far delivered only one of the two doses needed for durable protection. (CIDRAP)

Sweden’s Wolverine Coexistence Model Is Losing Ground: A once-celebrated Swedish conservation payment program is showing how quickly coexistence schemes can weaken when governments stop adjusting them to economic reality. The Conservation Performance Payment system, launched in 1996, paid Sámi reindeer-herding communities for living alongside wolverines rather than compensating them only after livestock losses. Early results helped rebuild endangered wolverine populations and made the program a global model. But new research from the University of York and Swedish Agricultural University finds that the gains have not held in northern strongholds. Payments have been frozen for two decades, their real value has fallen sharply, and local trust has eroded. The study warns that predator recovery can shift costs onto marginalized communities unless programs evolve with rising costs and local needs. (EurekAlert!)

Human Activity Is Reshaping Dolphin Friendships: A new study of Sarasota Bay bottlenose dolphins shows that human activity can affect not only where animals feed, but also who they spend time with. Researchers found that dolphins engaging in risky human-linked foraging — such as taking bait or catch from fishing gear, scavenging discarded bait, or approaching people for food — tended to associate with other dolphins using similar tactics. The work, published in Animal Behaviour, also found that severe red tide events changed the relationship between foraging behavior and social structure. That matters because dolphins learn from one another, and social bonds can shape survival strategies. The finding adds a social-network layer to concerns about feeding wildlife, fishing interactions, and environmental stress in coastal ecosystems. (Brookfield Zoo)

Bird Flu Gaps Threaten Wildlife Conservation: A new Wildlife Monographs paper argues that conservationists need better data on how highly pathogenic avian influenza moves through wild bird populations. University of Rhode Island ecologist Johanna Harvey reviewed host dynamics for circulating avian flu viruses and found an expanded set of susceptible species, including many migratory birds, along with higher transmission rates. The issue is not only public health. Wild birds are already stressed by habitat loss, climate change, contaminants, food shortages, and other pathogens. HPAI adds another pressure, especially for waterbirds and raptors that have suffered major mortality events. The paper frames bird flu as a wildlife conservation crisis and calls for targeted research that can help managers identify vulnerable species, anticipate spread, and make better mitigation decisions. (uri.edu)

Deadly Pathogens Put Rattlesnakes at Risk: University of Georgia researchers warn that some wild snake populations in the southeastern United States may face increased extinction pressure from a combination of fungal, bacterial, and parasitic infections. The study examined more than 500 snakes and found that several pathogens are more widespread across species than previously recognized. Pygmy rattlesnakes were singled out as especially vulnerable to serious illness and death, but the findings point to broader risks for native snake communities. Snakes are often overlooked in wildlife disease discussions, despite their ecological role as both predators and prey. The research suggests that disease surveillance should become a more routine part of reptile conservation, particularly as habitat change and other stressors make wild populations more vulnerable to infection. (UGA Today)

Humans Change Wildlife Even Without Building Anything: A new study covered by Smithsonian highlights an important conservation lesson from the pandemic era: wildlife responds not only to roads, cities, and habitat loss, but also to the simple presence of people. Researchers compared GPS tracking data from thousands of animals across 37 species with anonymized cellphone location data from 2019 and the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown period. The analysis suggests that animals adjusted their behavior when human presence changed, even in places where the physical landscape stayed the same. That complicates conservation planning because habitat quality is not just a matter of vegetation, protected boundaries, or infrastructure. Noise, movement, disturbance, and perceived risk may also shape where animals go, how they forage, and how successfully they share space with humans. (Smithsonian Magazine)

African Conservation Needs More Than Protected Areas: A new Biological Diversity commentary argues that Africa’s biodiversity cannot be saved by protected areas alone. Ecologist Luca Luiselli writes that much of the continent’s biodiversity persists outside formal reserves, in working landscapes such as sacred forests, agricultural mosaics, pastoral rangelands, and secondary forests. Examples include endangered primates in unprotected Cameroonian forests and pygmy hippo signs in Sierra Leone occurring largely outside reserves. The paper does not reject protected areas, but says conservation targets like 30×30 can become too focused on land area rather than species persistence, ecological connectivity, and local legitimacy. The proposed alternative is a broader conservation portfolio that recognizes community land rights, supports community-managed conservancies, and treats human-shaped landscapes as essential habitat rather than conservation leftovers. (EurekAlert!)

Pythons and Hurricanes Reshape Florida Rodents: A new study in Biological Diversity examines how invasive Burmese pythons and a major hurricane are pushing two endangered Key Largo rodent subspecies in different directions. Researchers estimated densities of native rodents after a Category 4 hurricane and in the context of python pressure, showing how island ecosystems can be hit by overlapping biological and climate-related threats. The Key Largo woodrat appears especially vulnerable, with its decline raising concern about extinction risk as global change continues to affect small, isolated habitats. The study underscores why conservation managers cannot treat invasive predators, storms, and habitat fragmentation as separate problems. For island endemics, a single disturbance can be serious; multiple disturbances can alter population trajectories in ways that make recovery far more difficult. (EurekAlert!)

Golden Lion Tamarins Face Global Trafficking Threat: Mongabay reports that a growing international black market is targeting golden lion tamarins, one of Brazil’s best-known endangered animals. The species has long been a conservation success story, thanks to decades of habitat protection, captive breeding, and reintroduction work in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. But seizures in places including Togo, Suriname, and the Brazilian Amazon suggest that organized traffickers are moving the monkeys through international networks for the exotic pet trade. The threat is especially troubling because golden lion tamarins have small, fragmented populations and depend on continued habitat management. Wildlife trafficking can remove breeding animals, spread disease, and undermine years of conservation investment. The case also shows how charismatic species can become more vulnerable precisely because people want to possess them. (Mongabay News)

New Wildlife AI Looks Up Into the Trees: Most camera-trap artificial intelligence tools are built for animals moving on the ground, but many elusive species live high in the forest canopy. Mongabay reports on TropiCam-AI, a new model designed to detect and identify tree-dwelling species. The system aims to close a major monitoring gap for tropical biodiversity surveys, where arboreal mammals, birds, and other canopy animals can be missed by conventional camera-trap setups. Better identification tools could help researchers process large image datasets faster and track species that are otherwise difficult to study. That matters for conservation because canopy species are often sensitive to logging, fragmentation, and hunting pressure. If the model performs well across varied forests, it could make biodiversity monitoring more efficient in habitats where field observation is slow and expensive.(Mongabay News)

Java Textiles Help Keep Gibbon Conservation Local: In Java, a women’s collective is linking forest-inspired textiles with gibbon conservation. Mongabay reports that the initiative uses local craft traditions to support awareness and livelihoods around the endangered Javan gibbon, whose remaining wild population is estimated at only about 4,000–4,500 individuals. The approach matters because conservation is often most durable when people living near habitat have a stake in protecting it. Rather than treating local communities only as threats to forest survival, the project turns cultural production into a conservation tool, connecting income, identity, and species protection. The story also fits a broader shift in conservation practice: saving animals is not only about patrols and protected areas, but also about building social systems that make habitat protection meaningful and economically possible. (Monga Bay)