Long COVID occurs when symptoms—new, continuing, or recurrent—arise four or more weeks after the initial coronavirus infection.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the official name given by the WHO to the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV), the new coronavirus that surfaced in 2019.
Vaccines aren’t just for kids. Thousands of adults go to the hospital each year for a serious (sometimes even deadly) disease they might have avoided if they had received the vaccination to prevent it.
There are seven known coronaviruses that affect humans, and they can cause respiratory diseases as ordinary as a cold to life-threatening ones, like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and SARS-CoV-2.
One day you might wake up with a painful blistering rash on one side of your body that looks like chicken pox. The odds are high that you have shingles, a skin condition caused by the herpes zoster virus.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) impairs the immune system by infecting certain immune cells.
There are all sorts of ways to get an infectious disease—from people and animals, to eating contaminated foods, to environmental exposure.
Most microbes in and around our bodies are harmless, but some evolve to become deadly threats to individual and public health.