Are pigs spreading Ebola? Researchers are investigating the possibility. The latest Ebola outbreak was confirmed in a remote region of the northern Democratic Republic of Congo in mid-May, and around the same time, 84 pigs died in eight nearby villages. Officials learned that the first man to contract the virus was a hunter who had been in contact with a wild boar carcass.

The World Health Organization had confirmed five human cases of Ebola as of June 8 and was looking into three other probable cases. Four of those people had died. If pigs can indeed transmit Ebola, it adds new complexity to international efforts to stop the highly contagious and deadly disease.

Fabian Leendertz, a disease expert at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, told Science magazine he doubts the Congo pigs carried Ebola. Pig deaths are not unusual in Congo, where diseases such as African swine fever often wipe out large numbers.

But scientists cannot entirely discount the possibility of Ebola infecting pigs. Science in 2009 reported that researchers in the Philippines found an Ebola strain in sick pigs. Although the strain has not been known to sicken humans, some of the pig farmers had antibodies to the virus, indicating they had come in contact with it.

And in 2011, according to the magazine, a team of scientists in Winnipeg discovered that “Ebola Zaire,” the strain found in both the current outbreak and the 2014-2016 outbreak in West Africa, can infect pigs in a lab and easily transmits between pigs sharing the same housing. Researchers later discovered the virus could also pass through the air from pigs to monkeys—leaving open the possibility that it might pass on to humans in the same way.

(Krieg Barrie)

Sick of conflict

It may seem obvious that parental divorce is psychologically stressful for kids, but scientists in Spain have confirmed that divorce even affects children’s physical health.

The researchers studied the families of 467 children ages 2 to 18. They found that following parental separation children are twice as likely to develop gastrointestinal, genitourinary, dermatological, or neurological problems than children in intact families.

The study supports previous research that has also shown a connection between family structure and children’s physical health. For example, a review published in The Linacre Quarterly in November 2014 noted that nearly twice as many children living in single-parent homes were in poor health than children living in two-parent families. And a study published in the November 2013 issue of the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology found that children of separated parents had higher biomarkers for inflammation, a signal of poor health, in middle age. —J.B.

(Handout)

Tumor treatment

For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a cancer treatment that is based on a genetic feature of the cancer rather than on the bodily location where it originated.

The drug, Keytruda, targets a type of solid tumor with genetic abnormalities that impede DNA repair inside cells. These tumors most often occur in colorectal, endometrial, and gastrointestinal cancers.

In clinical trials of the drug involving 149 patients, tumors shrank or disappeared in nearly 40 percent of patients.

Dung Le, an oncologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, told MIT Technology Review that about 4 percent of all advanced cancers—up to 30,000 patients a year in the United States—have the genetic characteristics that Keytruda could treat. —J.B.