Peter van Heusden (he/him) 🗿

Israel violating a ceasefire deal as a mob of Israeli settlers attack an American journalist and Palestinian grandma & an Israeli soccer match has to be cancelled because of violent fans is all the worse when you remember the deal calls to "de-radicalize" Palestinians and not Israelis

Last Ebola patient in Democratic Republic of the Congo discharged The last Ebola patient in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was discharged today, marking an important milestone in the efforts to end the outbreak.

The countdown to the end of DRC's most recent #Ebola outbreak has begun with the release from hospital of the last known patient. Of 64 cases (53 confirmed, 11 probables), there have been 45 deaths & 19 survivors. +35,000 people were vaccinated in this response. www.afro.who.int/news/last-eb...

Meet the man who built RFK Jr.’s kitchen cabinet Jeffrey Tucker, who elevated Covid contrarians now working for the health secretary, is building support for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.

A must-read @politico.com piece about the man behind the Great Barrington Declaration & the Brownstone Institute, two groups that were foundational and central to RFK Jr’s rise and to his MAHA agenda (I was interviewed for the piece; there’s a quote from me)

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers

German study shows how far right sets agenda thanks to mainstream parties reshaping their communications to respond to what are initially fringe issues, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate

shorturl.at/OFfig

They're open with their intentions. They want to provide the only analysis resources themselves.

Exclusive: Assad government secretly moved mass grave to cover up killings, Reuters investigation finds From 2019 to 2021, Syria’s authoritarian government carried out a secret operation to move tens of thousands of bodies from the exposed Qutayfah mass grave to a hidden site in the desert east of Damascus. The goal of the clandestine reburial was to hide evidence of atrocities as Bashar Assad tried to regain international standing

"With at least 34 trenches measuring 2 kilometers long, the grave in the Dhumair desert is among the most extensive created during the Syrian civil war, Reuters has found. Witness accounts and the dimensions of the new site suggest that tens of thousands of people could be buried there."

Aftonbladet

Greta Thunberg: “Israeli soldiers hit, kicked, starved, and tortured me”

• They placed a flag next to me, and anytime the flag touched me, they kicked me
• Whenever I raised my head to look at Ben-Gvir, I was kicked
• She was filmed while stripped naked

Aftonbladet: tinyurl.com/a33vxatc

A Quarter of the CDC Is Gone Another round of terminations, combined with previous layoffs and departures, has reduced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention workforce by about 3,000 people since January.

The CDC's union estimates that a quarter of the agency been gutted under the Trump administration. Here's our story at @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/cdc-te...

And despite the sterling work @olivia.science @timnitgebru.bsky.social and many others have done on critical AI materials, responding to this thing is *yet more* unpaid academic labour drawn from a vanishingly small time budget!

Is this EDS-HAT thing of yours facility specific? Reasons I've heard for not doing similar have included shortages of bioinformaticians, difficulty interpreting results, difficulty building data to action pathways. Can be overcome but how did you do it?

Illustration of Burrows-Wheeler Transform and many auxiliary structures from the input string how$now$brown$cow$#

New tool "bwt-svg" for making illustrations of the BWT and the many auxiliary arrays and other structures related to it. Pyodide-based no-installation-necessary interface here: benlangmead.github.io/bwt-svg/. (H/t to @robert.bio for pointing me to pyodide!) Full repo: github.com/benlangmead/....

Maldives becomes the first country to achieve ‘triple elimination’ of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, syphilis and hepatitis B

hq_who_departmentofcommunications.cmail19.com/t/d-e-gwgjl-...

100%! And for those making out this is some kind of moral failing of Sudanese or other Africans... just nope. No. Not going there.

my biggest beef with bluesky is that I get way more updates on what Curtis Yarvin or Peter Thiel than anything on the African continent

Wiley retracts study stolen by reviewer, following Retraction Watch coverage A Wiley journal has retracted a paper more than a year after a researcher reported the work was hers and had been stolen by a reviewer for another journal. As we reported in July, Shafaq Aftab, now…

Well done Shafaq Aftab. When a reviewer stole her work and published it under his own name, she fought for a YEAR to get the journal to retract the paper. Just wondering why it took Wiley a YEAR to do this. 🧪 #academicsky

retractionwatch.com/2025/10/03/w...

For some context the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report in addition to being just a good read, to quote wikipedia, "is the main vehicle for publishing public health information and recommendations that have been received by the CDC from state health departments. "

My quote of the day

Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get.

William Foege

Last month Trump said he wanted proof that COVID vaccines are effective. Yesterday, during his "semiannual" physical, Trump received a COVID vaccine as well as a flu shot.

That's because vaccines — which Trump's administration have made harder to get — work.

Standing in solidarity with colleagues at the CDC who were fired as part of yet another RIF wave.
We are all less safe without their expertise and dedication.

CDC has been a global leader in public health & played a key role in smallpox eradication. Health depts in red states & blue states rely on CDC expertise & support. The CDC EIS program trains the next generation of public health leaders & disease detectives.

They are burning it to the ground.

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials
“Disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists, the entire Washington office and the staff of a weekly public health journal were among those who learned late Friday that they would lose their jobs.
#GiftLink

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

YouTube video by Forbes Breaking News SHOCK CLAIM: RFK Jr. Says Children Circumcised Early Have Twice The Autism Rate Due To Tylenol Use

🧵RFK "HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS" Jr. is now linking circumcision with autism.

This nonsense was posted by his anti-vax group Children's Health Defense years ago, and I looked into it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS9D...

“A study, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that last season’s 2024–2025 mRNA COVID vaccines reduced people’s risk of emergency department visits by 29%, their risk of hospitalizations by 39% & their risk of death by 64%”

Benefits were seen even if 0 risk factors

A screenshot of the Oatmeal comic, featuring a colorful meal on a plate with emojis around it, the text reads: "Someone once told me that art is like emotional nutriton. That made sense to me. Art feeds my feelings (accompanied by a smiley face and sad face emoji). And if thats the case, consuming AI art is like eating styrofoam"

"consuming AI art is like eating styrofoam"

The always brilliant The Oatmeal on the emptiness and sadness of AI art

theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

I’ve known both David Adler and Zukiswa Wanner for many years and I’m truly saddened to receive news of their unjust detention in Israel. Both of them sailed with the Global Sumud Flotilla to demand an end to the blockade on Gaza and are being unjustly detained with no contact for four days.

An RFK jr. Antivax cottage industry by the pathological homeopathic quacks. Parents tell the guy which vaccine they gave the child.The guy will formulates a detox based on the info 250.00 a treatment.
This is not medicine or truth.
Austistic kids dont need to be detoxed.
Vaccines are safe.

U.S. AND THE THIRD WORLD AT ODDS OVER PATENTS (Published 1982)

43 years ago on 5 Oct 1982, the New York Times published this piece on this fun piece on WIPO negotiations: "An international patent conference opened today that pits the Reagan Administration against the third world and some Western allies." @profseanflynn.bsky.social @roneilll.bsky.social

Criticism of biased media coverage of Gaza is often discarded as baseless..

so we set out to study the coverage of Palestinian and Israeli victims by German press systematically!

The resulting study 'Hierarchies in Death' was just published #OA by Peacebuilding www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

FAIRYMAGS: A Galaxy Workflow for MAG Recovery Applied to Termite Microbiomes

On Day 1 of European Galaxy Days, Mina Hojat Ansari presented FAIRYMAGS: A Galaxy Workflow for MAG Recovery Applied to Termite Microbiomes.
Read more: https://elixir-europe.org/how-we-work/scientific-programme/commissioned-services/science/bfsp/fairymags

#termite #EGD2025 #microbiomes (1/2)

Hey remember when the CDC dropped 6 of the 8 foodborne illnesses from the nationwide monitoring system in July and one of them was listeria? Mentioning for no particular reason www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...