You couldn't ignore it in recent weeks. US President Donald Trump was hospitalized for treatment of Covid-19. He received, among other things, a cocktail of antibodies that was labeled as promising in all media reports. Promising thanks to data from experiments with monkeys and golden hamsters.

Less animal testing, more animal welfare. That is the title of an article in "Vet Magazine", a Dutch magazine for veterinarians. In this article Jan Langermans, head of Animal Science at BPRC, sheds light on how BPRC deals with animal experiments and animal welfare.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice. This means that the Nobel Prize is also a bit for all the laboratory animals that made this research possible. And when we talk about laboratory animals, in this case we are talking about chimpanzees.

Now that it’s getting colder, the sniffling in the Netherlands increases. Also, the flu season is just around the corner. This is even more unpleasant now that coronavirus is in the country as well, and the symptoms are similar. The way we get infected appears to play a role too.

At BPRC we study which cells are essential for the fight against infections and how we can stimulate these cells to swing into action. Modern equipment helps us in doing so, allowing us to collect more and more data from fewer animals. And this is important for animal research.

Last weekend, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment confirmed after reports from French and Dutch media that a Dutch tourist has contracted dengue fever in the South of France. She most likely contracted the infection from the Asian tiger mosquito.

Experts had long suspected, but now we know for sure. The West Nile virus has reached the Netherlands. The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment reports that a warbler has been found carrying the West Nile virus in the Utrecht region.

An estimated 400,000 people die each year from malaria, especially children under 5 years old. This is comparable to the number of people who now die from Covid-19. That is why a vaccine has long been worked on for this disease (with far fewer funds than for Covid-19). Unfortunately, this is a long way off.

Tuberculosis (TB), it is the most deadly infectious disease in the world. ± 1.5 million people die every year as a result of TB. The only vaccine currently available is BCG, but this vaccine has serious limitations.