Isabel
Evolutionary & population biology of vector-borne viral disease systems. NSF GRF 🦟 genetics PhD student in NC.
Arbovirologist & orthobunyavirus wonk. Public health advocate. 80s mosquito. Opinions exclusively my own. (she/her)
- “…there is not a day that goes by when I am not, for at least a few minutes, stunned like a deer in headlights by the weight of the unnecessary pain that is being caused — when I am overwhelmed by the sheer breadth and depth of it all.” yeah.
- The journal my first first author paper was published is shuttered. Friends are losing jobs and grants that support their and others’ jobs left and right. We’ve lost the security of winning fellowships = your funding is taken care of. No form of once-meaningful security means anything anymore.
- It’s a fox hunt. The point is destruction for cruelty’s sake and constant fear. Their own insecurity consumes them and the conspiracies they’ve spun give them an excuse to “punish” us for imagined crimes. They’re burning the fields & salting the earth because missing easter 2020…saved their lives.
- The constant nightmarish precarity of academia used to also mean there were ways to achieve temporary security within it. The last bit of trust that underlaid the tradeoff of ‘precarity for independence & curiosity’ is gone now. I have no intention of leaving, but what will be left to not leave?
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- spanish to english, perhaps?
- when even the Reagan-appointed half-retired judge is shocked by the grant “cancellations”…lordy
- when you’ve pretty much lost the Reagan appointees on your draconian & discriminatory ‘austerity’ measures I think your goose might be cooked
- There’s always been something grim about the way the US catalogues various catastrophes and injustices, most of which could be mitigated or managed more effectively with basic investments in infrastructure or social services. They’ll ‘fix’ that by dismantling half of the problem. Which half, though?
- NEW: NOAA retires its widely cited billion-dollar weather and climate database amid staff cuts. Unique database had been tallying disaster costs for 45 years. www.cnn.com/2025/05/08/c...
- Glad to see this out!! It’s been bafflingly difficult to convince people that assuming mosquito transmission of Oropouche is a sloppy prior directly contradicted by all available evidence 🥲 and that, in turn, it’s a serious problem that we know so little about Culicoides paraensis distribution…
- 🦟🦠 NEW! We looked at every experiment going back to the 1960s, and found that mosquitoes are almost certainly not primary or secondary vectors of Oropouche virus - a common claim in both the scientific literature and public health communication. #EpiSky #IDSky 😷🧪 journals.plos.org/plosntds/art...
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View full threadMore evidence against 🦟 Oropouche transmission. “If you bypass the midgut infection & escape barrier, it COULD be competent” – and if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. Given the strength of the midgut barrier + other tx nuances, it’s hard for viruses to evolve incrementally around it.
- That’s the second paper showing the currently circulating Oropouche reassortant strain can’t be transmitted by mosquitoes. (There’s enough baseline variability in vector competence studies that it’s valuable to have a couple showing the same thing across different 🦟🦠 lines, labs/insectaries, etc.)
- drawing a popgen blank. anyone know where I can find math for the allele frequency spectrum of a population (not a sample from the population) given a demography model (piecewise constant or whatever)?
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- if you give a TE an A/V current…what’s next? 5G? does their ambition for mischief know no bounds?
- “Such a pause is also part of a disturbing pattern suggesting that research can be stopped and restarted without serious consequences to our ability to address major health challenges. (1/2)
- The American Society for Microbiology is committed to ensuring that scientific research is conducted adhering to strict standards for biosafety and biosecurity, but pausing research is not the path forward. Read our statement: asm.org/press-releas...
- “Make no mistake, this approach will unnecessarily hinder scientific progress and will drive the ‘best and brightest’ away from the field at a time when our public health challenges are more complex than ever before.” (2/2)
- #USDA confirmed another #H5N1 #birdful infected dairy herd in Idaho, bringing ID's herd total to 87. It also confirmed infection in another mammal species, but the exact species isn't listed on its website. Seems like it's not cows, alpacas or swine. Anyone know? www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-po...
- My best guess (if it’s a dairy operation?) would be goats or *maybe* sheep - hopefully somebody can weigh in conclusively…
- My latest paper got way less engagement on here than on the other site. Real talk: I think this place has become too much of an echo chamber, and done too much to drive away communities that might hate Elon but not align 100% with the orthodoxy.
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View full threadNo, I think you don't understand. I'm not talking about the individual experience of using the app. I'm talking about the failure to draw a larger, more heterogeneous crowd away from Twitter.
- Understood - was replying to a reply with a more specific concern and a solution that helped me navigate it, not your post more broadly. Apologies if that was unclear.
- I’ve found that having discipline/interest-specific feeds helps with this - feed posts then auto-populate into timelines. It helps draw eyes of similarly minded individuals to otherwise transient posts & build community.
- I think my subfield(s) also left the other site earlier than most - it was hostile and weird for many of us who work on/adjacent to virus problems even before it changed hands.
- still contemplating this. appreciatively. perhaps even aspirationally.
- Besides the gorgeous journal cover, the article it links to uses 724 classic Chinese poems to estimate the range contraction of the Yangtze finless porpoise over 1400 years. These animals are threatened by human activity, have intelligence comparable to a gorilla & are critically endangered.
- Dive into our latest issue!🌊 www.cell.com/issue/S0960-... On the cover:Yangtze porpoises in troubled waters🐬 by Yaoyao Zhang and colleagues www.cell.com/current-biol...
- “current” biology…I see what they did there
- An example of what I mean when I say everyday consumer interactions for basic needs are hostile. A utility company services 8 million ppl in my state. They changed payment platforms. Just changed. Every customer has to create a new account, Re-enter payment info, set up billing, auto draft
- My partner qualified for NC’s subsidized health insurance plan this year. For reasons unknown to God or man, the person who signed him up over the phone recorded his name (Steven, as common as it gets) as “Stezen,” thus rendering it unusable. It’s been impossible to fix so far.
- I bought a used copy of Charlie Calisher’s history of arbovirology/memoir for $4 and promptly forgot it was en route for two weeks. Let’s say it’s a welcome bit of comic relief
- “so i rolled a pack of cigarettes into my undershirt sleeve, which was the style at the time,”
- cackling
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- well, see, this was his SECOND impression. his first was reading outside an upside-down tent in the outer banks
- I spend a LOT of time reading papers. It’s how I learned to do good research! Only reading abstract-level summaries (by authors or coal-powered LLMs) keeps you from engaging with HOW that knowledge was produced & replicates the authors’ blind spots. You have to critically evaluate the arguments!
- To establish expertise in any field, you need to know how people prove new ideas in it. Learn to critically evaluate *what* a given work proves, *how* they proved it, what they *claimed* they showed, and what of that they soundly supported. Even an overreaching title/abstract has *something* useful!
- Excited to announce that my research group is launching a *FREE* tick testing program called Nebraska Tick Testing (NeTT). We accept any ticks, both inside and outside Nebraska. We will identify the tick, screen it for pathogens, and provide a report. For more information visit: go.unmc.edu/nett
- oh neat! 🦟 🦠 feed tags
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- my phone has automatically recognized this crop as a panorama. which is the sort of mindset you need to appreciate liesl’s tummy in its full magnificence
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- sincerely my b fiorello the cat
- breaking the glass on some emergency liesl tummy for the occasion
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- he read too much. headache now
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- truly - unless that therapy dog is also trained in offensive maneuvers, I am not sure what it is really going to do for my stress levels at this point,
- This is such a neatly cohesive story (and an excellent systems virology journal club talk, to boot)! Arboviruses aren’t working with much in the way of genome size, but they manage to pack a lot of nuance into that small package 🦟
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- haha, thanks!! Always happy to bring some bug facts to the party 😅
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- “having to live with” implies they survive, which feels almost deliriously optimistic at this point
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View full thread(I knew people who worked on developing the evidence-based recs, only to have a WH doc saying “nah it’s fine” routed through the office of the director signed off and deliberately published <24h before the evidence-based one…then used to justify August 2020 full returns without mitigation measures)
- which is to say – I don’t think it was particularly great for kids’ mental health to have inadvertently been the vector of disease to older family members or teachers or bus drivers or [__] who were disabled or died as a result!
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- Even outside of the cardiac issues we now know are quite common among recovered kids, plenty of kids infected at school then spread it to parents or grandparents, with far more devastating repercussions in older family members. The WH killing school reopening policy recs from CDC cost lives.
- A key argument for a 🦟 role was that C. paraensis wasn’t in Cuba, which had a serious Oropouche epidemic, but there hadn’t been a midge survey reported from there since the 1970s. Turns out paraensis was a bit trap-shy, but abundant in human landing catches: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Once in grad school my advisor said she liked pouring agar plates (for growing bacterial colonies), because it's relaxing. I think I must looked at her like she was crazy. Now, I completely understand.
- the meditative power of head empty pipette time really can’t be understated
- (when i teched this was usually making aliquots, etc)
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- 🦟 for the arbovirus feed - I’ve wondered about that!
- you could say my research assistant and I work closely together 🧐
- Devastated by the EID news - home of my first ever first author paper 😭 I remember reading one issue cover to cover in high school.
- Oh no - I use BHL collections multiple times a week for my work 😭 it’s open access & the only place the old American Mosquito Control Association journal (Mosquito News) are kept, with a ton of work on disease vector surveillance, ecology, their pathogens, you name it. God.
- In addition to EVERY-FUCKING-THING ELSE The most vital of tools, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, is apparently homed at the Smithsonian. For obv reasons, the Smithsonian cannot retain it For free, you can access biodiversity-related texts going back to the 1400s! www.biodiversitylibrary.org
- Anecdotally, the only person I know with a food dye allergy is deathly allergic to a natural dye (carmine). Already tired of the ‘federal health regulation by naturopath facebook post’ era.
- Toxicologist here! This will improve the health of zero Americans. Current synthetic food dyes are not causing health problems, and are often times used because they are actually safer than natural food dyes. Reminder that guns are the #1 cause of death of children but we are going to ban food dyes.
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- yes, that’s the other big one 😭 thankfully it seems like this is more PR stunt than policy
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- seems pretty on brand for the head chef of Chez Roadkill
- a labor intensive tummy tuesday with the Oogenesis Understander
