There is a belief that Airbnb listings cause increased crime in residential neighborhoods - or at least annoying late-night parties which increase risk of crimes. However, a new paper suggests that while Airbnb listings can be linked to a reduction in the local social dynamics that prevent crime, it isn't the tourists committing the crimes. And it takes years, which means Airbnb listings may be a symptom rather than the cause.

A new paper has statistically linked inflammatory bowel disease, an umbrella term for chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, to processed foods. But because every food is processed - no one eats wheat that hasn't been milled - the term has now become "ultra-processed."

Raw food, from milk to meat, can obviously bring higher risk of bacteria. The raw milk fad in the US creates risk of illness orders of magnitude higher than milk that has been pasteurized to remove harmful bacteria.

In Europe, the 'raw' dog food fad may be creating something even worse; multidrug-resistant bacteria identical to those found in hospital patients. Drug-resistant infections kill an estimated 700,000 people a year globally and, with the figure projected to rise to 10 million by 2050 if no action is taken, the World Health Organisation (WHO) classes antibiotic resistance as one of the greatest public health threats facing humanity. 

Like coronavirus, Hepatitis C was only discovered as unique a few decades ago, but in that time science took its 2 million new HCV infections every year, with an estimated 70 million carriers of the virus globally, and 400,000 deaths annually to finding a cure. 

Directly acting antivirals (DAAs) can now stop it and therefore prevent the liver cirrhosis and liver cancer that can develop. Next up, said Professor Sir Michael Houghton at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology along with three other scientists for discovering it was distinct in 1989, is a vaccine.

Two approaches in development may lead to an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine that is scalable and can be transported and stored at room temperature.

They'll be too late to help with the actual COVID-19 but since coronavirus constantly mutates, like the flu, and 2019 was the third coronavirus pandemic in the last 17 years, it could be valuable for the next iteration.

One strategy employs modified bacteriophage particles that can be inhaled to deliver protection via the lungs to the immune system. The other delivers injectable adeno-associated virus-phage particles that directly encode protection against the virus in immune cells. They're only in rodents so far but they produced antibodies.

The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) utilized mRNA technology previously unused in FDA-approved vaccines. One of its chief proponents bounced from research job to research job for low pay because government-controlled science funding prefers guaranteed success for each round of funding rather than the hit-but-we'll-mostly-miss basic research approach of the private sector.  mRNA-based vaccines provide instructions for the body to build and release foreign proteins, such as the spike protein in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but prior to the pandemic government funding agencies believed mRNA was a waste of time.

Now everyone will be rushing to advance mRNA but what is yet to be known; will the benefits last?