This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. There have been plenty of reports of potentially concerning viruses this last year. Covid is still causing thousands of deaths, and bird flu appears set to make the jump to human-to-human transmission. Now there are new concerns over Oropouche, a virus largely spread by bites from insects called midges (sometimes called no-see-ums in the US). There have been outbreaks of the Oropouche virus…
