The U.S. has officially declared the monkeypox outbreak a national health emergency.  This is in addition to various states already declaring their own emergencies.  The designation frees up funds to ramp up vaccination efforts, testing, education, and outreach.  In the meantime, many monkeypox patients feel there is a lack of guidance and have been reporting excruciating pain.  Dominique Mosbergen, medical science reporter at the WSJ, joins us for what to know.

 

Next, researchers at Yale University have used a new system they created called OrganEx to restore cells in some organs of pigs that had just died.  When blood is no longer pumping through organs the cells begin to die, but with this system, it restored circulation and even repaired some of the damaged cells.  Evan Bush, science reporter at NBC News, joins us for this breakthrough and the ethical questions raised about how medicine defines death.

 

Finally, Polio is back in the U.S. after being eliminated in 1979.  There was a recent case in an unvaccinated 20-year-old in Rockland County, New York.  What makes this case interesting is that it came from a vaccine derived strain, meaning that it mutated from an oral vaccine that had small amounts of the live virus.  Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg, joins us for this latest case and how it affects the global eradication efforts.

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