The planet is on the brink of disaster: the risk of a new pandemic, even more devastating than previous public health emergencies, has skyrocketed; but investment and measures to address a threat of this magnitude have stagnated or diminished. According to a group of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), who analyzed the level of anticipation and response to epidemic outbreaks following the Ebola crisis a decade ago, “global preparedness is not keeping pace with the pandemic risk.” The situation is “alarming,” they conclude: the pandemic risk is worsening, public trust is eroding, and inequality is becoming entrenched. “The world is no safer,” they stated. Their warnings came precisely 24 hours after the WHO declared a global emergency again due to a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

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One of the main drivers of aging is the accumulation of aged cells in tissues. For reasons not entirely understood, with age, the body accumulates senescent cells that do not die, and that benefit one of the suspected culprits behind the body’s deterioration over the years: inflammation. Now, a team led by Harvard University researcher David Lagares has found a possible way to reverse this process in the lungs, one of the organs whose cells deteriorate over time and can lead to diseases such as fibrosis, an incurable condition that primarily affects people over 65.

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The hantavirus outbreak on the luxury cruise ship MV Hondius has reignited old hoaxes and conspiracy theories on social media. As with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, hordes of misinformation and seemingly serious claims, lacking any scientific basis, have once again spread around this new outbreak, which is of a completely different scale and nature than the pandemic of six years ago.

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The first patient involved in the hantavirus outbreak boarded a ship in Ushuaia, Argentina, unaware that he was carrying the virus that would trigger a health crisis. The passenger and his wife, both Dutch, had been traveling around Argentina for weeks before boarding the MV Hondius, an expedition ship. The leading hypothesis is that they “were infected off the ship,” according to the WHO.

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Fernando Simón’s reappearance in some media outlets, claiming that the risk of hantavirus is “very low” for Spain, has reminded many people of the initial public statements made by the director of Spain’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES) before Covid-19 became a pandemic. While infectious diseases do have a degree of unpredictability, this situation is completely different; hantavirus bears little resemblance to SARS-CoV-2.

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