Samira Mubareka

UNLOCKED | Feds mum on wilting conservation program funding as nature spending dips 62 per cent

www.hilltimes.com/story/2026/0...

Horrific news from Iraq where feminist activist and human rights defender Yanar Mohammed, co-founder and director of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), has been assassinated by gunmen outside of her home just days after returning from Canada.

🚨MSc & PhD opportunity

Dr. Yan Zhou is recruiting for a CIHR-funded H5N1 immunology project. CL3 training included.

Apply via vido.applytojobs.ca/research/45608

#PhD #MSc #Virology

Meet Dr. Rebecca Katz at #WOHC2026 🔒

Biosafety extends beyond labs - to conflict zones, dual-use research & geopolitical tensions. Submit your research on biosecurity frameworks, DURC & health security

📅 Deadline March 13

👉 globalohc.org/minisite/9WO...

#OneHealth #Biosecurity

There haven't been new reports of #H5N1 infected dairy herds in the US for several months, but I keep an eye on the #USDA page where they're posted. Sometime in the past few weeks 4 more herds were added to Idaho's total. Infections were last April-May. publicdashboards.dl.usda.gov/t/MRP_PUB/vi...

Flight Pattern Trailer | The National Ballet of Canada YouTube video by The National Ballet of Canada

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YSp...
A beautiful piece, with M. Brueggergosman-Lee

Integrating measles wastewater and clinical whole-genome sequencing enables high-resolution tracking of virus evolution and transmission Measles outbreaks have surged globally in recent years, but current surveillance systems have limited capacity to monitor measles virus (MeV) transmission and evolution at population scale. Although M...

New preprint from our Gates-funded Modjadji initiative showing that whole-genome surveillance of measles virus from wastewater greatly expands our ability for monitoring and control.

Here, with our colleagues in South Africa - U.S., unfortunately, likely up next.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mapping the specificity of H3N2 strain-specific and cross-reactive human neutralizing antibodies elicited by the 2025-2026 influenza vaccine An H3N2 variant, named subclade K, continues to circulate widely during the 2025-2026 influenza season. This virus possesses a hemagglutinin (HA) protein that has eleven substitutions relative to the ...

Our preprint examining the specificity of human antibodies that cross-react with subclade K H3N2 viruses was posted this morning on medRxiv. These studies have implications on what vaccine strains should be selected for next year’s influenza season. 1/
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

#TeamCanada you are winners, even with Silver, you played a better game! 🍁🏒🇨🇦

You are all amazing.

Picture of Arinjay Banerjee

Picture of Louise Moncla

Congrats to the 2026 Ann Palmenberg Junior Investigator Awardees Arinjay Banerjee (left) and Louise Moncla (right). Check out their accolades in your member email. Read more about Ann Palmenberg's impact on virology and ASV here:

news.wisc.edu/remembering-...

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Dark Butress
David Pugh
1989

I am very humbled and honoured to receive the Ann Palmenberg Junior Investigator Award. I am grateful for the support of my mentors, trainees, colleagues, collaborators, nominator, family and friends. Thank you @amersocvirology.bsky.social. #LoveVirology

Consolation Lake
H.G. Glyde
n.d.

First human #H5N1 case of 2026 in #Cambodia: a 30-year-old man from Kampot province. Sequencing, virus isolation & animal investigations ongoing. Dead chicken at home before onset. Patient has since recovered. 🦠💉😷🐓🥼🔬🧪

Sequencing, contact tracing, and poultry investigations ongoing.

A map showing the probability of movement for terrestrial animals across Canada and the USA.

Now published: Landscape connectivity across Canada and the USA. A seamless, high resolution connectivity map across both countries. 🧪🌎 Open access in Facets, including open data www.facetsjournal.com/doi/full/10....

Thanks to @paulpobrien.bsky.social and Simon Tapper who led the work and collaboration from @richpither.bsky.social, @smubareka.bsky.social, Angela Brennan, and Mike Brown.

Addressing pandemic-wide systematic errors in the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny - Nature Methods This Resource paper presents a global SARS-CoV-2 phylogenetic tree of 4,471,579 high-quality genomes consistently constructed by Viridian, an efficient amplicon-aware assembler.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Our paper, led by @martibartfast.bsky.social
a) correcting errors in 4.5 million genomes & their phylogeny
b) improving representation of the Global South in public data
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
(thread 1/n)

She wasn’t supposed to perform in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’ at the COC. It’s a star-making turn for the ages Canadian soprano Sarah Dufresne, a late replacement in the role of Gilda, marks a astonishing COC debut in this somewhat uneven remount production.

Sarah Dufresne in Rigoletto at @canadianopera.bsky.social is a revelation. A "star-making turn" as @joshuachong.bsky.social writes. She sings Gilda in one more performance, Feb. 8. I was lucky to hear it!
www.thestar.com/entertainmen...

Winter Moon
Christopher Pratt
1987

Screening melkveebedrijf brengt nog vijf koeien met antistoffen tegen vogelgriep aan het licht Op een melkveebedrijf in Noardeast-Fryslân zijn na screening vijf koeien met antistoffen tegen vogelgriep gevonden, maar er is geen actief virus aangetoond. Minister Wiersma verwacht volgende week een...

5 more dairy cows tested positive for #H5N1 #birdflu antibodies on the Dutch farm where a previous cow tested positive. No surprise that if 1 was positive, others would be too. This dairy farm is the first outside the US to report H5N1 transmission. www-melkvee-nl.translate.goog/artikel/1450...

Cross-reactive H5N1 neuraminidase antibodies by age and influenza A imprinting cohorts of the past century: population-based serosurvey, British Columbia, Canada Investigators show a substantial proportion of the general population has cross-reactive antibodies against the neuraminidase protein of emerging influenza

Cross-reactive H5N1 neuraminidase antibodies by age and influenza A imprinting cohorts of the past century: population-based serosurvey, British Columbia, Canada academic.oup.com/jid/article/...

Great article by @ainsliecruickshank.bsky.social on the CWHC funding situation, which limits our ability to monitor for diseases like #AvianInfluenza in wildlife.

We so appreciate of the support our partner funding agencies provide. Folks in those agencies really care about wildlife health.

Underfunding threatens Canada’s wildlife disease response | The Narwhal As bird flu and chronic wasting disease spread, experts say Canada’s wildlife disease monitoring network needs more resources to respond

Damien Joly, the chief executive officer of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, is warning a lack of funding for wildlife disease monitoring is undermining Canada’s ability to detect and respond to emerging threats to biodiversity, agriculture and human health.
thenarwhal.ca/wildlife-dis...

Come join my group as a postdoc on a fun wildepi.ca project looking at the evolution of endemic alpha- and betacoronaviruses in Canadian wildlife. Computational work will inform concurrent experimental work in the @banerjeelab.ca and @smubareka.bsky.social groups!

bioinformatics.ca/jobs/postdoc...

January 9, 2026. Updated: 1/6/2026
Detections of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Wild Birds-
Last 30 Days (new rendering)
{https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/wild-birds}

January 9, 2025. Updated: 1/6/2026.
Detections of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Mammals
{https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-detections/mammals}

Re-emergence of #YellowFever in Colombia, with human and non-human primate cases. Textbook example of the importance of a #OneHealth approach

Exploration and docility in coexisting rodents Abstract. There is increasing interest in understanding how behaviour influences trade-offs that facilitate species coexistence. In the absence of spatiote

#Smammal! Exploration and docility in coexisting rodents! academic.oup.com/biolinnean/a... @albrechts-h.bsky.social

A One Health trial design to accelerate Lassa fever vaccines - Nature Medicine We propose an interdisciplinary framework to address the considerable challenges that are restricting the development of vaccines for zoonotic diseases with epidemic potential.

A One Health trial design to accelerate Lassa fever vaccines

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

January
Alex Colville
1974