If you've notice pea-sized brown bugs on your plants that are leaving holes from munching, it could be kudzu bugs. Closely related to stink bugs, kudzu bugs are plant munchers that will feed on everything from foliage to vegetables.

It’s in the air, and now in the water. Samples from Southern Nevada’s wastewater have shown an increase of the COVID-19 virus in areas of the valley, indicating a possible summer surge of the illness that has spread across the country.

Richard Oxborough plucked a vial of human blood from the rack on his lab bench. The UNLV researcher warmed the blood and fed it to a colony of mosquitoes. The critters won’t be quite as voracious as normal because Oxborough didn’t have the chance to starve them, he quipped.

The Southern Nevada Health District is encouraging the community to “fight the bite” this summer, as the Southern Nevada Health District announced in May the detection of the first West Nile virus-positive mosquitoes in Clark County of the 2024 season.

Rats in New York City are becoming more than a nuisance. The New York City Department of Health has released a health advisory after recording six cases of human leptospirosis, an infection with Leptospira bacteria that can be spread through rat urine. In 2023, the city recorded 24 cases, the highest number in a single year.

Ticks are the worst kind of pest. Tiny and hard to spot on bare skin, they look like freckles or moles to the naked eye but latch onto hosts, sucking their blood and possibly spreading diseases such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Rabbit fever (tularemia) and Lyme disease.In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported approximately 63,000 cases of Lyme disease.