TWiV reviews resurgence of Lassa fever in West Africa, at least 3 paralytic cases of cVDPV2 in Zimbabwe, CWD from eating prion-laden plants, measles in New Orleans and Broward County Florida, failure of Florida Surgeon General to support vaccination, a measles variant in Switzerland, SARS-CoV-2 persistent infections, leaky blood-brain-barrier for long COVID brain fog, West Nile virus transmitted among mosquitoes by the excreta, and viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes.

Vincent travels to McGill University in Montreal, Canada to join Angela for a discussion of the careers and the research of two faculty members, Corinne Maurice and Jesse Shapiro, and their PhD trainees Anshul Sinha and Sana Naderi.

For the first TWiV of 2020 we reveal that microbiome depletion with antibiotics alters the immune response to influenza vaccine, and how successive blood meals facilitate virus dissemination in mosquitoes and transmission potential.

At the Medical College of Wisconsin, Vincent talks with current and former members of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology about their work and their careers.

If you have always wanted to know what coral reefs and the human oral cavity have in common, listen as guests David Pride and Forest Rohwer talk about their work on the microbiomes and viromes of these two environments, and you’ll also understand why mucus is cool.

Vincent and Alan meet up with Julie and Paul at the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, to talk about their work on the pathogenesis of poliovirus and measles virus.