For how we live.
Most infections end when the immune system clears them. A few have evolved ways to hide, integrate or persist — which is why they can last a lifetime, and why 'cure' means something different for each.
It hangs in the air for up to two hours and infects the great majority of susceptible people it reaches. Less well known: it can erase part of the immune memory a person had already built to other diseases.
A real condition with a formal case definition, a measurable population-level burden, and — so far — no treatment proven to reverse it. What the studies do and do not establish.
Every vaccine does the same job — teach the immune system to recognise a pathogen before it arrives. What differs is how they show it the target: live, inactivated, protein, viral vector, or mRNA.
Farm-raised children really are protected from asthma, and the mechanism has been traced to microbial exposure and innate immunity. What has not been shown is that household hygiene caused the allergy epidemic.
Blood samples from a West African vaccine trial show both licensed Ebola vaccines generate antibodies that bind Bundibugyo virus — the species with no vaccine of its own, now causing DRC's largest outbreak on record.
A study in patients with VITT maps the trigger to a specific epitope on an adenoviral core protein, and to a single amino acid change that redirects the antibody onto a human platelet protein.
Three laureates, three papers, and a 30-year gap between the first observation and the therapies it enabled. The prize rewards work that was against the consensus when it was published.