In images reminiscent of the biblical plague of blood from the Exodus story, Florida's coasts experience a concerning natural phenomenon every year that turns the sea red: "red tide." Now, in a new study, researchers from the University of South Florida have identified for the first time nearly a dozen viruses connected to this mysterious phenomenon, according to a report in The Independent.

Finally, Karenia brevis has been identified as the cause of 'red tide' as researchers identified nearly a dozen viruses associated with red tides that are harmful and costly https://t.co/DTZoaASsS7 pic.twitter.com/TujfH9dW5R

— Samer سامر (@sam6) March 23, 2025

 The new research, published in the journal mSphere of the American Society for Microbiology, could help predict future "red tide" events and possibly even prevent some of their severe damages.

What is red tide – and why is it dangerous? Red tide is actually a massive bloom of Karenia brevis algae, a single-celled organism that produces neurotoxins. The algae bloom causes the death of fish, birds, and other marine creatures, and can cause respiratory problems in humans and even death.

The phenomenon is driven by environmental factors such as ocean currents, nutrients washed into the water, extreme weather events, and climate changes that lead to rising sea temperatures. The red tide occurs naturally in Florida almost every year, typically in late summer or early fall, and lasts between three and five months, according to data from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Service (FWC), which partnered in the research.

An aggressive toxic algal bloom called 'red tide' is killing ocean life in Florida, where there's now a state of emergency pic.twitter.com/idSykdABhI

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) August 18, 2018

The economic damages of the phenomenon are estimated in the millions of dollars, and it affects large areas. Just last month, a strip of red water in Florida stretched for more than 199 miles, from the Tampa Bay area to Key West. The phenomenon is not unique to Florida, and around the same period, Argentina's coasts also turned red.

With climate change and continued warming, the red tide phenomenon raises concern, as according to researchers, rising temperatures are one of the factors encouraging the phenomenon.

During "red tide" events, researchers collected samples of Karenia brevis blooms to analyze them in the laboratory. They used a method that determines the DNA composition of the sample to find the viruses. "We know that viruses play an important role in the dynamics of harmful algae blooms, but we didn't know which viruses might be associated with Karenia brevis blooms," said Jean Lim, the lead researcher of the study from the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. "Now that we've identified several viruses in the red tide bloom, we can work to determine which viruses might affect these events."

According to Lim, "There may be a connection between the abundance of viruses and the dynamics of the bloom. For example, an increase in the number of viruses found in a sample might indicate that a red tide bloom is about to begin, or that it is about to end."

The new findings could improve monitoring and prediction efforts for the phenomenon. Since viruses target specific organisms, they may provide an environmentally friendly way to manage the blooms. "There may be specific viruses that might only infect Karenia brevis," Lim added. "If we can identify and isolate these viruses, they could be used as a biological control agent."

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An early summer outbreak of West Nile virus in Israel has claimed the lives of two individuals, both women in their 80s, according to the country's Health Ministry. The mosquito-borne virus has been diagnosed in 21 people, with 17 of them hospitalized due to neurological symptoms.

The Health Ministry states that while most infected individuals do not display symptoms, approximately 20% of those affected, primarily the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, will develop flu-like symptoms. These symptoms may include fever, general malaise, headaches, or body aches. In less than 1% of cases, neurological complications may arise.

Although West Nile virus is not uncommon in Israel, this year's outbreak occurred earlier than usual and affected a significant number of people. The first reports of the outbreak emerged earlier this month in north Tel Aviv.

The center of Israel is considered a high-risk area for the disease due to the region's high humidity, which creates an ideal breeding environment for mosquitoes. As a result, residents in this area are urged to take precautions to avoid mosquito bites and limit the spread of the virus.

Health authorities are closely monitoring the situation and have implemented measures to control the mosquito population and minimize the risk of further infections. The public is advised to stay informed and follow the guidelines provided by the Health Ministry to protect themselves and others from the West Nile virus.

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Despite the arrival of the troubling Omicron coronavirus variant in Israel, the reproduction rate decreased from 1.07 to 1.03 on Tuesday, according to Health Ministry data. 

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Of the 108,300 screened for the virus in the past 24 hours, 636 (0.63%) tested positive. The infection rate stands at 0.63%. There are currently 5,570 active cases in the country, with 158 patients hospitalized. Of those, 117 are in serious condition. 

Israel has reported 1,343,218 cases since the outbreak of the pandemic last year, including 8,195 deaths. 

Thus far, 4,078,395 Israelis over the age of 16 have been fully vaccinated, 5,775,598 received two doses, and 6,326,037 got their first jabs. 

According to the ministry's director of Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Elroi Preiss, the new strain is cause for alarm. 

Speaking at a Knesset committee meeting on Tuesday, she said, "There's no chance the vaccine will be as effective against Omicron as it is against Delta. We must buy time to understand the new variant, whether it is deadly and if it harms children.

"What worries us the most is the rapid spread of the mutation in South Africa. The number of cases went from 200 to 2,000 in just two days. They described how one person infected many others, both vaccinated and unvaccinated. From what we hear, vaccinated individuals do not exhibit significant symptoms, but this is just preliminary data … It will take a few weeks" to know more. 

According to latest data, coronavirus hospitalizations have increased by 330% in the South Africa's Gauteng region, where the variant was first detected.

According to scientists, Omicron has 50 mutations, at least 30 of which are in the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells and which current vaccines focus on to boost the body's immune system to combat COVID-19. As such, Omicron has a heightened ability to transmit and evade antibodies.

Elroi Preiss also said she would soon receive data from South African health officials on the effectiveness of the vaccine against the new strain. 

Also on Tuesday, CEO of Moderna vaccine manufacturer Stephane Bancel told British paper Financial Times that existing vaccines will most likely be much less effective at tackling Omicron, and warned it would take months before vaccine manufacturers would adapt their doses.

Meanwhile, CEO of Pfizer pharmaceutical giant Albert Bourla told media on Monday the company had begun tweaking its vaccine to better protect against Omicron, a process that will take around 100 days. 

He stressed there might not be a need for the inoculation because Pfizer was able to create vaccines for the Beta and Delta COVID-19 mutations, but they were never used because the original shots remained effective. 

Nevertheless, the impact of Omicron on Pfizer's two-dose vaccine remains to be seen.

"I don't think that the result will be the vaccines don't protect. I think the result could be, which we don't know yet, the vaccines protect less," Bourla told CNBC news. 

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The coronavirus reproduction rate, which kept subsiding in Israel for over a month, has risen back to 1, the Health Ministry reported Friday morning. Of the 71,082 Israelis who were screened for the virus on Thursday, 467 (0.71%) tested positive. 

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There are currently 5,215 active cases in the country with 173 patients hospitalized. Of those, 126 are in serious condition. 

Thus far, 4,038,711 Israelis have been fully inoculated, 5,761,459 have received two shots and 6,263,415 have been vaccinated with one dose. 

Israel has reported 1,339,531 cases, including 8,154 deaths, since the outbreak of the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, the ministry is poised to begin a national vaccination campaign for children ages five to 11. A shipment of Pfizer's special children's doses is expected to arrive at Ben-Gurion International Airport early next week. 

In related news, a study published in the New York Times and the prestigious Science journal on Thursday suggested that contrary to the World Health Organization's initial report, the first known patient to contract coronavirus was a vendor at a large seafood market in Wuhan, China. 

The WHO originally suggested patient zero was an accountant with the surname Chen who lived many miles from the site.

University of Arizona's Michael Worobey, who is considered a leading expert in tracing viruses, stumbled upon discrepancies when he was combing through the information that had previously been made public with regard to the origins of COVID-19. 

Worobey argued that the vendor's ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and a recent analysis of the earliest hospitalized patients' connections to the market suggest the pandemic might have begun there.

The analysis identified a woman named Wei Guixian, who worked at the market and developed symptoms around Dec. 11, 2019, as the first verified coronavirus patient. The WHO has also documented a case with a woman who got sick around this date and who had a connection to the market. 

By the end of December 2019, doctors at hospitals in Wuhan noticed an unusual rise in pneumonia cases in people who worked at the seafood market, which, according to the New York Times, was "a dank and poorly ventilated space where seafood, poultry, meat and wild animals were sold."

The research showed that the accountant that the WHO had identified as the first patient became ill on Dec. 16, not on Dec. 8 as was originally reported. According to Worobey, on Dec. 8 Chen had a dental appointment that had no connection to the coronavirus. 

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Severe symptoms of COVID-19, leading often to death, are thought to result from the patient's own acute immune response rather than from damage inflicted directly by the virus. Immense research efforts are invested in figuring out how the virus manages to mount an effective invasion while throwing the immune system off course.

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A new study, published today in Nature, reveals a multipronged strategy that the virus employs to ensure its quick and efficient replication, while avoiding detection by the immune system. The joint labor of the research groups of Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Dr. Nir Paran and Dr. Tomer Israely of the Israel Institute for Biological, Chemical and Environmental Sciences, this study focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms at work during infection by SARS-CoV-2 at the cellular level.

During an infection, our cells are normally able to recognize that they're being invaded and quickly dispatch signaling molecules, which alert the immune system of the attack. With SARS-CoV-2 it was apparent early on that something was not working quite right – not only is the immune response delayed, enabling the virus to quickly replicate, unhindered, but once this response does occur it's often so severe that instead of fighting the virus it causes damage to its human host.

"Most of the research that has addressed this issue so far concentrated on specific viral proteins and characterized their functions. Yet not enough is known today about what is actually going on in the infected cells themselves," says Stern-Ginossar, of the Molecular Genetics Department. "So we infected cells with the virus and proceeded to assess how infection affects important biochemical processes in the cell, such as gene expression and protein synthesis."

When cells are infected by viruses, they start expressing a series of specific anti-viral genes – some act as first-line defenders and meet the virus head on in the cell itself, while others are secreted to the cell's environment, alerting neighboring cells and recruiting the immune system to combat the invader. At this point, both the cell and the virus race to the ribosomes, the cell's protein synthesis factories, which the virus itself lacks. What ensues is a battle between the two over this precious resource.

The new study has elucidated how SARS-CoV-2 gains the upper hand in this battle: It is able to quickly, in a matter of hours, take over the cell's protein-making machinery and at the same time to neutralize the cell's anti-viral signaling, both internal and external, delaying and muddling the immune response.

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The researchers showed that the virus is able to hack the cell's hardware, taking over its protein-synthesis machinery, by relying on three separate, yet complementary, tactics. The first tactic the virus uses is to reduce the cell's capacity for translating genes into proteins, meaning that less proteins are synthesized overall. The second tactic is that it actively degrades the cell's messenger RNAs (mRNA) – the molecules that carry instructions for making proteins from the DNA to the ribosomes – while its own mRNA transcripts remain protected. Finally, the study revealed that the virus is also able to prevent the export of mRNAs from the cell's nucleus, where they are synthesized, to the cell's main chamber, where they normally serve as the template for protein synthesis.

"By employing this three-way strategy, which appears to be unique to SARS-CoV-2, the virus is able to efficiently execute what we call 'host shutoff' – where the virus takes over the cell's protein-synthesis capacity," Stern-Ginossar explains. "In this way, messages from important anti-viral genes, which the cell rushes to produce upon infection, do not make it to the factory floor to be translated into active proteins, resulting in the delayed immune response we are seeing in the clinic." The good news is that this study was also successful in identifying the viral proteins involved in the process of host shutoff by SARS-CoV-2, which could spell new opportunities for developing effective COVID-19 treatments.

Study authors also included Yaara Finkel, Avi Gluck, Aharon Nachshon, Dr. Roni Winkler, Tal Fisher, Batsheva Rozman, Dr. Orel Mizrahi and Dr. Michal Schwartz, who are all members of Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar's group; Dr. Yoav Lubelsky and Binyamin Zuckerman from Prof. Igor Ulitsky's group in the Department of Biological Regulation; Dr. Boris Slobodin from the Department of Biomolecular Sciences – as well as Dr. Yfat Yahalom-Ronen and Dr. Hadas Tamir from the Israel Institute for Biological, Chemical and Environmental Sciences.

Stern-Ginossar's research is supported by Skirball Chair in New Scientists; Knell Family Center for Microbiology; American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science 70th Anniversary Lab; Ben B. and Joyce E. Eisenberg Foundation; Maurice and Vivienne Wohl Biology Endowment; and Miel de Botton.

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According to Conley, Trump was treated with a steroid after a drop in oxygen levels on Saturday to some 93%. Despite the drop, the president had not experienced shortness of breath, the doctor said.

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Conley said Trump was given the steroid dexamethasone during his hospitalization and that the pre.

He says the president's medical team is hoping Trump will be up and about, out of bed and eating and drinking throughout the day.

Earlier Sunday, Trump said from his hospital room that the next few days would be the "real test" of his treatment for COVID-19, after a series of contradictory messages from the White House caused widespread confusion about his condition.

In a four-minute video posted on Twitter on Saturday from his hospital suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Trump said he was feeling "much better."

"Over the next period of a few days, I guess that's the real test, so we'll be seeing what happens over those next couple of days," Trump said into the camera, seated in front of an American flag and wearing a jacket and open-necked shirt.

Trump's illness has upended the campaign ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election and cast a spotlight on the president's handling of the pandemic. The Republican president is trailing Democratic rival Joe Biden in opinion polls.

In an early morning tweet on Sunday, Trump said "Thank you so much!" – referring to clusters of supporters who gathered on Saturday night outside the Walter Reed hospital waving Trump 2020 flags.

Differing assessments of Trump's health from administration officials on Saturday left it unclear how ill the president had become since he tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday night.

A White House team of doctors said on Saturday morning Trump's condition was improving and that he was already talking about returning to the White House.

Within minutes, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows gave reporters a less rosy assessment, saying, "The president's vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We're still not on a clear path to a full recovery."

Meadows, whose initial comments were delivered on condition that he not be identified, altered his tone hours later, telling Reuters that Trump was doing "very well" and that "doctors are very pleased with his vital signs."

Meadows did not clarify the discrepancy in his comments. A Trump adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity said the president was not happy to learn of Meadows' initial remarks.

Administration officials have described the move to Walter Reed as precautionary and said Trump would stay for several days.

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Another source who was briefed on Trump's condition said the president was given supplemental oxygen before he went to the hospital. The decision to hospitalize Trump came after he had experienced difficulty breathing and his oxygen level dropped, according to a source familiar with the situation.

White House doctor Sean P. Conley told reporters outside the hospital on Saturday that Trump had not had trouble breathing, and was not given oxygen at Walter Reed.

"The team and I are extremely happy with the progress the president has made," Conley said.

He declined to give a timetable for Trump's possible release from the hospital, and later had to issue a statement saying he misspoke after appearing to suggest Trump had been diagnosed as early as Wednesday.

In a statement on Saturday evening, Conley said the president was "not yet out of the woods" but his team remained cautiously optimistic.

"Today's spectacle – doctors saying one thing, White House sources saying another thing, and both later amending their statements – only reinforces the credibility problems of this administration," said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

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Video: Photography: Gil Kramer; Editing: Sivan Shuster and Eden Barel

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US officials told Reuters in October that the United States had carried out a secret cyber strike on Iran after the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh blamed on Tehran. Iran denied involvement in the attacks, which were claimed by Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi movement.

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"We recently faced a highly organized and state-sponsored attack on our e-government infrastructure which was ... repelled by the country's security shield," Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran's minister for communications and information technology, was quoted by the semi-official Mehr news agency as saying.

"It was a very big attack," Azari-Jahromi said, adding that details would be revealed later.

It was not clear whether Azari-Jahromi was referring to the US cyberattack, which US officials said took place in late September and targeted Tehran's ability to spread "propaganda."

Asked about Reuters' October report of a cyberattack, Azari-Jahromi said then: "They must have dreamt it."

In late September, Iran reviewed security measures at its key Gulf oil and gas facilities, including preparedness for cyberattacks, following media reports of Washington weighing possible cyberattacks on Tehran.

The reported US cyber strike highlighted how President Donald Trump's administration has been trying to counter what it sees as Iranian aggression while avoiding an outright military conflict.

Iran has long been on alert over the threat of cyberattacks from abroad. The United States and Israel covertly sabotaged Iran's disputed nuclear program in 2009 and 2010 with the Stuxnet computer virus, which destroyed a number of Iranian centrifuges that were enriching uranium.

Tensions in the Gulf have escalated sharply since Trump last year withdrew from Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and reimposed trade and financial sanctions on Tehran.

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