For Decades, Trans People Have Helped Lead the Fight Against Sexual Violence

Today, trans and gender-nonconforming survivors continue a legacy of resistance that goes back longer than we may know.

By Gabriel Arkles ,

 Truthout

April 29, 2026

People attend the Trans Day of Visibility Rally hosted by the Christopher Street Project on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 2025.Bryan Dozier / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

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Over the past year, we have seen the Trump administration repeatedly use the specter of sexual violence to scapegoat immigrants and trans people — specifically women and transfeminine people. Both historically and currently, these groups are disproportionately likely to face sexual violence, but in the right-wing narrative, they have been reframed as its perpetrators. While breathtaking in its hypocritical victim-blaming, this story is actually an old one: Powerful men excuse or deny their own acts of sexual violence while demonizing marginalized communities as the “real” threat to justify their repression.

But for as long as that story has unfolded, people have resisted. Every April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, a time to recommit to supporting survivors and preventing sexual assault. This year, I want to focus on some of those stories of resistance. For decades, trans people, queens, butches, and other gender-nonconforming people in the U.S. have resisted sexual violence in countless ways — whether through seeking policy change, opening their homes to other survivors, telling their stories, escaping attackers, confronting harassment, or organizing others to support survivors. What follows are just a few examples.


Frances Thompson’s 1866 Testimony

Frances Thompson, a Black disabled woman, was one of the many Black people attacked by white people during the Memphis Massacre of 1866. In the aftermath, she testified before Congress about her experience of being raped. Her testimony was part of an effort to pass the Reconstruction Amendments, and she won. Partly because of her testimony, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all people.

The promise of that amendment has yet to be realized. It did not even protect Thompson in her lifetime: Years after her testimony, authorities arrested and stripped her — another sexual assault at the hands of white men. Thompson was fined and jailed after these authorities learned that she was a transgender woman, and the white press speculated that, as a trans woman, she must have lied about getting attacked. She continued to speak out, telling a reporter about mistreatment from the chief of police — allegations the reporter declined to put in print. But Thompson’s legacy lives on, and still today, Black people, trans people, women, and disabled people targeted by the government use the 14th amendment as a legal tool to demand equal treatment.

Related Story

Trans People Behind Bars Share How They Are Navigating the Dangers of Visibility
The vitriol of Trump’s anti-trans attacks has stoked anti-trans violence by prison staff and other incarcerated people. By Gabriel Arkles , Truthout/TheAppeal March 31, 2026


Ralph Kerwineo’s 1914 Article

Ralph Kerwineo, a multiracial clerk in Milwaukee, catapulted into the public spotlight when his first wife, Mamie White, went to the police to report that he was assigned female at birth. She did so after he had left her and married a younger woman, Dorothy Klenowski. When put on trial, Kerwineo managed to convince the judge that he lived and dressed as a man solely for economic and safety reasons, not for any “immoral” purpose. Kerwineo used the media spotlight to condemn male violence toward women, writing about the prevalence of sexual harassment particularly in the workplace. He explained, “Don’t misunderstand me; there are good men in the world, just as there are good women, but living, both as a man and a woman, I have found that most men do not consider sexual sins of any great consequences. Two-thirds of the physicians I met made a nurse’s virtue the price of influence in getting her steady work.” Klenowski shared the same message, telling a reporter that she “had to leave place after place of employment because of the overtures to me by either the proprietors or others in authority.”


Don Solovich’s 1923 Report

Don Solovich, a Serbian-speaking immigrant, performer, server, and butler, refused to be silent when they encountered violence. One day in 1923, Solovich met a man named Macon Irby on the street in California. Irby commented on Solovich’s visible femininity, and Solovich explained they were a female impersonator. The two decided to get a hotel room together. Irby tried to initiate sex, but Solovich said no, after which Irby beat and robbed them. Solovich went to the police, and Irby was charged with robbery. Irby’s defense was that it was Solovich who tried to initiate sex, which outraged Irby so much that he beat Solovich. Irby denied taking their money and, in explaining why he beat them, imitated the feminine way Solovich walked for the jury. The first jury could not reach a verdict, so Irby was tried again, and Solovich would have had to testify again. That jury convicted, but the conviction was then overturned on appeal — the prosecutor had elicited testimony implying that Irby had sex with men, which the appellate court ruled was irrelevant to the issue of robbery. Years later, Solovich was killed, and their killer offered a similar defense for his violence in court.


Mabel Hampton’s Escapes, Around 1910, 1921

Mabel Hampton, a Black stud, dancer, singer, and domestic worker, encountered sexual assault numerous times in her life — and she found ways to get away. Her uncle tried to rape her when she was just 8 years old. She screamed and kicked, and soon after, she ran away, using money she earned dancing for change on the street to leave town. When she was a teenager, strangers assaulted her, and she managed to dash onto a subway car to escape when they tried to move her, narrowly dodging a thrown knife. This time she told her friends, who drew their own knives and looked for her attackers. Hampton supported civil rights and lesbian movements over the course of decades, and she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974.


Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray’s 1940 Letters

Pauli Murray, the Black transmasculine lawyer, writer, professor, reverend, and saint, is probably best known for their brilliant legal strategies opposing race and sex discrimination. But before they became a lawyer, they had their own encounters with the legal system. In 1940, when Murray was traveling with their girlfriend Adelene “Mac” McBean through Virginia, they were both arrested for objecting to the racist treatment they received on a segregated bus. After white officers jailed them, some of the men in an adjacent cell started verbally harassing Murray and Mac. These men also used an angled mirror under the cell door to look at them, depriving them of any privacy. In response, Murray applied principles of nonviolent struggle and wrote a letter to the men, explaining how they had come to be arrested and stressing how unjust racial segregation was. The harassment stopped. Four men pushed apology notes back to them. The women Murray and Mac were confined with also became less hostile. As Murray wrote in one of their memoirs, “eventually we were all agreeing on the need for solidarity in the struggle for racial emancipation.”


Stormé DeLarverie’s 1969 Bail Money

Stormé DeLarverie, a disabled Black performer, survived plenty of violence in her life. While sometimes called a butch lesbian, male impersonator, drag king, trans man, gender-bender, or nonbinary person, she refused labels and expressed no preference on the gendered language people use. Deeply committed to protecting her community from street-based harassment and other violence, she not only worked as a bouncer at a lesbian bar, she also regularly patrolled the streets in her off hours to see if anyone could use her help. That’s what DeLarverie was doing at Stonewall in 1969 — just seeing if anyone needed anything. When a cop called her a slur and punched her in the eye, though, she spun around and knocked him out with one punch. Then she went home to tend her eye and get money so she could bail out anyone who needed it. She was often armed and never shied away from confronting someone harassing LGBTQ+ people, all of whom she considered her babies. Later in her life, she told an interviewer: “I’m a human being that survived. I’ve helped other people survive.”


Sylvia Rivera’s 1973 Speech

Sylvia Rivera, a Puerto Rican street queen, revolutionary, and another Stonewall veteran, supported her community’s safety through many means, including direct action and mutual aid. Rivera’s 1973 speech — now famous thanks to Tourmaline’s archival work — is a powerful example of how she called on others to show up for gay people beaten and raped in jail. “I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them. Have you ever been beaten up and raped in jail?” she asked the crowd. “They’ve been beaten up and raped after they’ve had to spend much of their money in jail to get their self home and to try to get their sex changes.… I have been to jail. I have been raped, and beaten.”

Rivera took the audience to task for failing their siblings, but she didn’t stop there. She called on them to come to the headquarters of the organization she co-founded — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) — to learn more. Among other things, the STAR Manifesto demanded “the right to self-determination over the use of our bodies” and “the immediate end of all police harassment.”


Dee Deirdre Farmer’s 1989 Lawsuit

Before Dee Deirdre Farmer brought her case to the Supreme Court and won, prison officials had nearly complete impunity when it came to allowing sexual violence in prisons. Farmer nonetheless pursued a case in 1989 demanding accountability after officials ignored the risk she faced as a young trans woman in a federal penitentiary for adult men, leading to her rape. She brought her case without a lawyer through the lower courts and all the way up to the Supreme Court, finally getting representation from the ACLU once she had convinced the Supreme Court to hear her case. Against the odds, she won, with the Supreme Court unanimously ruling in 1994 that violent assault was not “part of the penalty” for breaking the law. Her case has since been cited tens of thousands of times. In the decades since, Farmer has continued to advocate for trans, LGBTQ+, HIV-positive, and disabled people in prison, assisting over a thousand incarcerated people with their own cases.


Lorena Borjas’s Cart and Folding Bed, 1980s to 2020

Lorena Borjas, an immigrant from Mexico and survivor of trafficking, police violence, and domestic violence, helped countless other trans Latina New Yorkers survive pandemics, poverty, and violence. She worked relentlessly, usually without pay, to protect her community. She filled her cart with condoms and food and brought it to trans sex workers on the streets in Queens. Borjas welcomed trans people who didn’t have a safe place to stay into her own home, where she had a folding bed for them to sleep on. She connected trafficking survivors with immigration lawyers. She raised money to post bail. For countless survivors, she offered advice, connection, support, and love.


Juan Evans’s 2014 March

Juan Evans, a formerly incarcerated trans man and organizer with Racial Justice Action Center and Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative (SnapCo) in Atlanta, spent his life fighting for prison abolition and the freedom, health, and safety of trans sex workers and Black women, among others. In 2014, he was pulled over, and the police officer, surprised by his ID and gender presentation, demanded to know about his genitals. The officer arrested Evans for being trans, repeatedly threatening him with the assault of a strip search to inspect his genitals and calling him a “thing” and an “it.” His wife, his lawyer, and his boss came to the station and got him out. Afterward, Evans led a march and rally to demand change and spoke to the press. He received an official apology from the mayor and worked with others at SnapCo to push for better policies and training for police. Through SnapCo, he also used somatic healing to address the trauma of the experience, and continued organizing to close jails.


Alyssa Rodriguez’s 2022 Settlement

Alyssa Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican trans New Yorker, was criminalized and incarcerated several times, and advocated for herself and other LGBTQ+ people in carceral systems. She was confined in juvenile detention as a teen, where she was denied hormone treatment, forced to wear boys’ clothes and underwear, and punished for her femininity. She started legal action in 2006 that ultimately led to important changes in how transfeminine, gender-nonconforming, and LGBTQ+ young people were treated in juvenile detention in New York State. Years later, Rodriguez brought a lawsuit against the New York City Department of Correction when officials’ actions led to her rape on Rikers Island. While she passed away in 2020 before her lawsuit concluded, her estate settled the case for $1.4 million.

Fighting sexual assault has been a key part of many liberation movements, including movements for trans and queer liberation. Today, trans and gender-nonconforming survivors continue a legacy of resistance that goes back longer than we know. Trans and gender-nonconforming people — in the midst of the unrelenting and seemingly ever-escalating attacks on our communities — continue to organize to provide shelter, support each other, find safer havens, share our stories, defend ourselves, mobilize to protect rights, and demand accountability.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Gabriel Arkles
Gabriel Arkles is an attorney and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. His work has also appeared in publications such as NBC News, CBS, the Advocate, Scholar and Feminist Online, NYU Law Review, Northeastern Law Journal, Southwestern Law Review, and Signs. He writes in his individual capacity, and his views do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

Women of the Rosenstrasse protest challenged the Nazi regime for their detained Jewish husbands’ freedom – and won

(The Conversation) — Couples in interfaith marriages came under intense pressure in Nazi Germany. But women’s protests in February 1943 may have helped save their husbands.

A sculpture by Ingeborg Hunzinger commemorates the Rosenstrasse protest in Berlin. (NikiSublime/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY)

Nathan Stoltzfus and Danielle Wirsansky
March 12, 2026

(The Conversation) — On the cold evening of Feb. 27, 1943, Charlotte Israel gathered with a small crowd of women on the Rosenstrasse, a narrow street in central Berlin. They were not Jewish, but their husbands were, and the men had just been arrested in a sweeping roundup of more than 9,000 Berlin Jews. Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS and an architect of the Holocaust’s murder of 6 million Jews, called this arrest a “de-judaization of the Reich.”

Nearly 2,000 of those arrested had non-Jewish wives and were crammed together in a building on the Rosenstrasse. Israel and the other women who had gathered outside resolved to return the next day. Early the next morning, as she approached Rosenstrasse in search of her husband, Annie Radlauer heard a chorus of voices growing louder as she drew nearer: “Give us our husbands back!” The vigil, which sometimes grew into collective protests, continued off and on until March 6.

This protest still raises questions about how Hitler ruled and about attempts to rescue German Jews.


Families under pressure

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Nazi Germany banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and people it considered “Aryans,” and it ratcheted up pressures for already married couples to divorce.

In most of these marriages, the non-Jewish partners were Christian women who faced enormous social stigma and political threats. Their households were considered “Jewish,” and the Gestapo could storm their homes, day or night, in a terrifying search.

Jewish women married to gentile men, on the other hand, lived under the protection of an “Aryan household,” and virtually all were exempted from wearing the yellow star that Jews in Germany were required to wear from 1941 onward. Yet their husbands were pressured by restrictions to their careers.

Jews married to Christians did face persecution, and at least hundreds of them were murdered in the Holocaust. The Gestapo deported Jews whose spouses had divorced them to labor and death camps, intending that they would never return.

Over the decade leading up to Rosenstrasse, however, as many spouses refused the pressure to divorce, the regime created temporary exemptions. Intermarried couples with Christian children were classified as “privileged” Jews, for example, exempt from wearing the yellow star. And until Himmler’s February 1943 campaign, even “non-privileged” Jews who did wear the star were “temporarily” held back from deportations.

Courage on the street

That February’s mass arrests are sometimes referred to as the “Factory Action,” since many Jews were arrested at work. But others were snatched from home or from the street if seen wearing the star.



Laws in Nazi Germany forced Jewish people to wear a yellow Star of David badge from 1941 onward.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R99993/German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The women and girls who gathered on Rosenstrasse were not political activists. They were wives, mothers and children trying to keep their families together under a murderous dictatorship. Their protest was unusual for its public visibility, since non-Nazi public gatherings were outlawed. Eyewitnesses recalled the women shouting for the release of their husbands and moments when guards threatened to shoot if protesters did not clear the street.

Most of the imprisoned Rosenstrasse Jews were released on March 6. American intelligence reported that Himmler’s action was discontinued “because of the protest which such action aroused.”

Meanwhile, 7,000 other Jews arrested in the same roundup – Jews not shielded by family relationships with non-Jews – were deported to Auschwitz, with many murdered.
Weighing the impact

Some scholars see the protest as tipping the balance to save the 2,000 men’s lives – based, in part, on events leading up to Rosenstrasse.

On Dec. 6, 1942, Adolf Hitler had authorized Joseph Goebbels, in his role as district leader of Berlin, to “ensure that the unprivileged full Jews are taken out of Germany,” likely to be murdered. And Nazi officials had promised Auschwitz’s Buna work camp thousands of skilled Jewish laborers – a quota that was not met because of the Rosenstrasse Jews’ release.



But Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad by February 1943, coinciding with an increase in Allied bombing raids, sent public morale plunging. That made public opposition a bigger concern for the regime, especially for Goebbels, the propaganda minister. On March 6, he wrote that he had discontinued the deportation of the Rosenstrasse prisoners because “large throngs” gathered to side with the Jews.

During the decade since Hitler took power, women married to Jewish men defied scornful social, economic and political pressure, day after day. Some historians see their refusal to comply – even putting their lives on the line for their families – as causing Hitler to make a series of concessions.

Other scholars, however, say this runs “a danger of dramatically underestimating the power of the Nazi regime.” Gestapo terror suppressed all outward resistance, they argue, and a street protest could not have influenced policy.

This interpretation holds that the regime never intended to send the Rosenstrasse Jews to Auschwitz or elsewhere in the east but was holding the men to register them and select some for labor in Berlin.

Never before or after did the regime imprison Jews for such purposes. In any case, these protesters could only have had influence because they were not Jewish. Any Jewish resistance, such as the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that started that April on the eve of Passover, was violently suppressed.

‘We stuck together’

Our research sees intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse protest as significant for several reasons.

First, they highlight how gender shapes expectations about protest and resistance. Nazi society cast women primarily as wives and mothers. Christian women wishing to reunite their families without calling for Hitler’s demise, or the release of all Jews, were harder for the regime to portray as political enemies or criminal agitators.

Today, a pillar commemorates the women’s protest.
Adam Carr/English Wikipedia via Wikimedia Commons

Second, the protest underscores the importance of visibility. Much of Nazi persecution relied on secrecy and masking genocide with bureaucratic language and routines. In Germany, deportations to killing sites or forced labor camps were often carried out quickly, with limited public exposure. A protest in the center of Berlin made secrecy impossible.

Third, the Rosenstrasse protest illuminates the range of responses available, in certain circumstances, to ordinary people living under Hitler. While armed resistance movements have received extensive attention, protests rooted in family and community operated differently. For example, Hitler compromised with German women who publicly protested orders to leave their families in order to evacuate cities being bombed by the Allies. Nazi officials appeased protesters opposing the removal of crucifixes from German schools.

The Rosenstrasse protest has become part of wider conversations about women-led resistance in World War II – alongside actions such as sheltering their Jewish neighbors, serving as couriers for underground networks or using workplaces and churches to quietly obstruct Nazi policies.

Decades later, Holocaust survivor Margot Graebert remembered what was at stake on Rosenstrasse. Her father and sister were held there, and her mother brought her to the protest. In the years before, “We’d seen so many families (of intermarriage) split up … and we stuck together.”

Rosenstrasse was not only a public protest but also a struggle to keep families from being torn apart: Above all, the women were fighting for the return of their own husbands and relatives. Its outcome does not change the scale of Nazi persecution or suggest that the regime tolerated dissent. But we argue that Rosenstrasse and its testimonies still matter today – not as a simple story of triumph but as a revealing debate about what protests could and could not accomplish under Nazism.

Nathan Stoltzfus is co-founder of the Rosenstrasse Civil Courage Foundation.

(Danielle Wirsansky, Ph.D. Candidate in Modern European History, Florida State University. Nathan Stoltzfus, Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies, Florida State University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)


The Conversation religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The Conversation is solely responsible for this content.

SPAGYRIC HERBALISM

Wild blueberries: New review explores benefits for heart, metabolism and the microbiome

Evidence links wild blueberries to “whole body” health benefits

Wild Blueberry Association of North America

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Frozen Wild Blueberries

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Credit: Wild Blueberry Association of North America (WBANA)

A new scientific review summarizes the growing body of research on wild blueberries and cardiometabolic health, which includes factors like blood vessel function, blood pressure, blood lipids (cholesterol and triglycerides) and blood sugar (glucose). 

The review was published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition and developed from an expert symposium hosted by the Wild Blueberry Association of North America (WBANA) in Bar Harbor, Maine.1 Twelve experts participated in the symposium from the fields of nutrition, food science, dietetics, nutrition metabolism and physiology, cardiovascular and cognitive function and health, gut health and microbiology, and preclinical and clinical models. Financial support was provided in the form of travel reimbursement to the symposium, but no funding was received to support the development of this manuscript. 

The paper summarizes 12 human clinical trials on the cardiometabolic effects of wild blueberries spanning 24 years and four countries, as well as dozens of other clinical, translational, and mechanistic studies on wild blueberries, cultivated blueberries, and cardiometabolic outcomes. 

The authors report that findings are most consistent for vascular function, while results for blood pressure, blood lipids and glycemic control are promising but underscore the need for larger, well-controlled clinical research studies. 

The paper also explores related health outcomes impacted by overall cardiometabolic wellness, such as gut health and cognitive function. 

A deeper look at the findings:1 

Improved blood vessel function

Across the clinical literature, improvements in blood vessel function are one of the most consistent findings. Trials included in the review suggest wild blueberries can help support endothelial function (or how well blood vessels relax and respond to stimuli), sometimes within hours after a single serving and in other cases with regular intake over weeks or months.  

Beneficial changes to the gut microbiome

The authors of the review explain that wild blueberries provide fiber and polyphenols that reach the colon (only about ~5–10% of these compounds are metabolized/absorbed in the small intestine) and are transformed by gut microbes into metabolites that can be absorbed into blood circulation. Microbial metabolites may also account for up to 40% of the active compounds in blood after eating polyphenol-rich foods like wild blueberries. In a six-week clinical study, adults who consumed 25 grams of freeze-dried wild blueberry powder daily increased beneficial Bifidobacterium species. The review highlights the gut microbiome as a likely contributor to the berries’ cardiometabolic effects, but more research is needed to better understand their role. 

Sharper thinking and memory

The review summarizes clinical intervention studies in older adults showing wild blueberry intake may support aspects of cognitive performance, possibly due to benefits on whole body circulation among other cardiometabolic improvements, including thinking speed and memory, in both single-serving and longer interventions. 

Clinically relevant improvements to blood pressure, lipids and glycemic control

For people with elevated cardiometabolic risk, several studies in the review show clinical improvements in blood pressure, glycemic control, and lipid markers such as total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides following weeks of wild blueberry intake. The researchers note that baseline health status, medications, background diet, and differences in metabolism and the gut microbiome may influence outcomes. The authors encourage more research designed to identify “responders,” clarify optimal dosing and food forms, and evaluate a broader set of biomarkers. 

How wild blueberries may work 

“What makes wild blueberries remarkable is that they contain numerous polyphenols and nutrients and don’t appear to exert their health benefits through just one mechanism,” explains Sarah A. Johnson, PhD, RDN, Associate Professor at Florida State University, registered dietitian nutritionist, and lead author of the review. “The evidence suggests these berries may support multiple biological pathways relevant to cardiometabolic health, from blood vessel function to inflammation and oxidative stress, with effects that can vary from person to person. Recent research on the role of the gut microbiome in determining their health benefits is exciting and may help researchers determine ways to support the gut microbiome to enhance their health benefits.” 

The review describes several pathways that may be involved, including nitric oxide signaling that supports healthy circulation, inflammation and oxidative stress pathways, lipid and glucose metabolism, and interactions with the gut microbiome. 

How much and how often? 

In this review, wild blueberries were studied in multiple forms. Benefits have been observed when consumed regularly over weeks or months and with practical amounts. This means aiming to eat about one cup of wild blueberries every day. 

Most wild blueberries are available frozen, making them easy to keep on hand year-round. Try adding them to smoothies, oatmeal, yogurt, salads, or baked goods. 

Why wild blueberries are special 

Wild blueberries, also called lowbush blueberries, grow in Maine and Eastern Canada and challenging conditions such as harsh winters. These stressors can stimulate the plants to produce a diverse profile of protective compounds, including polyphenols such as anthocyanins. Wild blueberries contain around 30 distinct anthocyanin forms. 

“Wild blueberries have been valued by people for thousands of years,” notes Dorothy Klimis-Zacas, PhD, FACN, Professor of Clinical Nutrition at the University of Maine and co-lead author on the study. “Traditional knowledge recognized their value, and today’s research continues to explore how the unique composition of wild blueberries may support health when eaten as part of an overall balanced diet.” 

Reference: 

1. Johnson SA, et al. Wild blueberries and cardiometabolic health: A current review of the evidence. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. Published online ahead of print January 24, 2026. Doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2025.2610406. 

About the Wild Blueberry Association of North America 

The Wild Blueberry Association of North America (WBANA) is a trade association representing wild blueberry farmers and processors in Maine and Eastern Canada. WBANA supports and shares research exploring the health potential of wild blueberries and provides recipes and nutrition information for consumers. Learn more at www.wildblueberries.com. 

---

Journal

Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition

DOI

10.1080/10408398.2025.2610406 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Wild blueberries and cardiometabolic health: a current review of the evidence

Article Publication Date

24-Jan-2026

COI Statement

No funding was received to support the development of this manuscript. Financial support was provided in the form of travel reimbursement to the symposium, and the symposium was funded by the WBANA. Several co-authors of the review currently have grants funded by WBANA.

UH OH

Old diseases return as settlement pushes into the Amazon rainforest

Human case numbers of yellow fever have grown alongside the border between forested and urban areas

University of California - Santa Barbara

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(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Human activity continues to expand ever further into wild areas, throwing ecology out of balance. But what begins as an environmental issue often evolves into a human problem.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara investigated how changes in land use may be driving the growth in human yellow fever cases in the Amazon basin. Their analysis, published in Biology Letters, reveals that the growing border between forested and urban areas is causing an alarming uptick in cases.

“Yellow fever is increasingly infecting humans when they are living close to the forest,” said author Kacie Ring, a doctoral student co-advised by Professors Andy MacDonald and Cherie Briggs. “And this is because humans are encroaching into areas where the disease is circulating naturally, disrupting its transmission cycle in the forest."

Diseases like yellow fever had become rare in South America, mostly confined to monkeys in the jungles. The situation was a testament to the remarkable success of public health efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But the region is now in danger of redeveloping urban transmission cycles, where the disease spreads among the population without the need for a non-human host.

The geography of disease

Ring, MacDonald and junior research specialist Terrell Sipin collected data on the number of human yellow fever cases in districts of Brazil, Peru and Colombia within the Amazon Basin, obtaining records from each country’s public health agency. These records stretched back to 2000 for Brazil, 2007 for Colombia and 2016 for Peru.

The authors also culled data on land use from the MapBiomas Project, a large effort to classify land use and land cover. They divided use into categories such as pasture, agriculture, forest and urban areas.

The team compared case rates against three major geographic trends: the average patch size of forest in a given area; forest edge density, or the amount of forest perimeter in a given area; and the amount of interface specifically between forested and urban areas.

In simpler models that only considered the impact of edge density, the team did see a positive relationship with the probability of a yellow fever spillover event taking place. However, this contribution was dwarfed by the effect of forest-urban adjacency in more complex models. It was the proximity of settled areas to the forest that mattered most for predicting yellow fever spillover to humans. A 10% increase in forest–urban adjacency raised the probability of a spillover event by 0.09, or the equivalent of a 150% increase in the number of yellow fever spillover events in a given year. And this borderland is growing by around 13% per year, on average, in the regions included in the study.

When ecology doesn’t match epidemiology

Several recent studies have looked at the effect of forest fragmentation on the ecology of yellow fever in the wild. Measures of deforestation correlated with higher case numbers in monkeys and spread of the disease into new regions. In this light, the authors suspected metrics like patch size and edge density would have a significant effect on human cases.

But, in any model that included interactions between human society and the forest, it was this interaction that proved the strongest predictor of human cases. “It was a little surprising that the ecology wasn’t more predictive of the actual transmission to humans,” said MacDonald, a professor in UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

“It seems the thing that’s causing the disease spillover is that humans are moving closer to the forest edge,” Ring said.

The greater the perimeter between the forest and urban areas, the more exposure humans have to the disease. There are often greater infection rates among vectors at the forest’s edges, as well. For instance, higher temperatures and more standing water along the forest margins may lead to a greater number of more active mosquitoes.

The return of an old foe

Yellow fever wasn’t always rare in the Americas. The neotropics used to have the same sorts of urban transmission cycles as in Western Africa, where the disease is still a significant issue. Along with malaria, yellow fever was behind the failure of the French attempt to complete the Panama Canal. “They were losing workers left and right,” MacDonald said. “Over 20,000 workers died.” That said, humans didn’t know what caused yellow fever or malaria at that time, so they couldn’t attribute individual deaths to each disease.

It took new discoveries and massive vector-control initiatives to drive disease rates down to the point where the American enterprise could finally succeed in 1914. These efforts continued in the 1940s and ‘50s with simultaneous vaccination campaigns and mosquito eradication initiatives that finally freed South America of these urban transmission cycles by the 1940s. 

“But a campaign like this would never be executed in the modern day,” Ring added. “Widespread use of DDT led to long-term storage in the soil and contamination in drinking water.”

Unfortunately, cases have begun rising again, spilling over the expanding border between the forest and urban areas. “We can see the benefits of earlier efforts dwindling,” Ring said. “It shows that diseases can come up again if you don’t properly maintain the infrastructure of public health and vaccination.”

“The concern is that the more we have these spillover events, the more likely it is that we’re going to see these urban transmission cycles reemerging,” MacDonald added. 

While the paper doesn’t include data past 2021, data from the World Health Organization shows that case rates have continued to grow. In 2024, human cases of yellow fever were seen mainly across the Amazon region, according to a WHO report. Cases in 2025, however, have been detected mainly in areas outside the Amazon. The 212 cases confirmed before the report published represent a threefold increase compared to the 61 cases in 2024.

Because yellow fever is still relatively rare in the Americas, health agencies don’t have large stockpiles of the vaccine. “So, if cases change suddenly, then we’re unprepared to deal with it,” MacDonald said.

The team will continue to investigate the effects of changing land use on infectious diseases. Ring is currently looking at the interaction between deforestation and tick-borne diseases in Madagascar. Meanwhile, MacDonald plans to investigate how other kinds of land uses affect vector-borne diseases in the Amazon region. For instance, he’s curious how clearing forest for pasture and agricultural production influences the transmission of diseases like malaria, dengue and leishmaniasis.

MacDonald hopes his group’s work will help governments and communities in South America bring development in better accord with human and environmental health. As Ring said, “these emerging infectious diseases are indicators of broader environmental issues.”

 

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Journal

Biology Letters

Forty years of tracking trees reveals how global change is impacting Amazon and Andean Forest diversity

University of Liverpool

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New research published in Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals significant recent shifts in tree diversity among the tropical forests of the Andes and Amazon, driven by global change.

The study, led by Dr Belen Fadrique from the University of Liverpool, uses 40 years of records on tree species collected by hundreds of international botanists and ecologists in long-term plots to offer comprehensive insights into tree diversity change in the world’s most diverse forests.

Key Findings

At the continental level, the team found that species richness has remained largely stable, but this masks significant regional differences. In some extensive regions diversity was declining, while in others it increased.

The analysis revealed that forests in hotter, drier, and more seasonal areas tended to experience declines in species richness.  Meanwhile, some areas with more intact ecosystems and with naturally more dynamic forests actually gained species.

In the Central Andes, Guyana Shield and Central-Eastern Amazon forests the majority of forest monitoring plots lost species through time, while most in the Northern Andes and Western Amazon showed an increase in tree species number.

While temperature increase has an overall pervasive effect on richness, the research highlights that rainfall and its seasonal patterns play a major role in shaping these regional trends.

Notably, the Northern Andes is identified as a potentially critical "refuge" that could shelter species displaced by climate change.

The research team analysed data from a huge region spanning the South American tropics which is home to more than 20,000 tree species.

They worked over 40 years across ten South American countries in 406 long-term floristic plots, measured periodically since the 1970s and 1980s. By examining these unique records, the team was able to track changes in tree richness for the first time and identify the driving factors behind those shifts.

Impact of climate change on plant species

Plant species have limited options to survive climate change: they can alter their distributions as environmental conditions change, or they can acclimate to these new conditions. If species cannot move or acclimate, their populations will decline, potentially leading to extinction.

Dr Belen Fadrique is a Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society and University of Liverpool Research Fellow with the Department of Geography & Planning. She is the lead author of the study and conducted the research when she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Leeds.

Dr Fadrique said: "Our work assessing species responses to climate change points to profound changes in forest composition, and species richness at multiple scales."

Flavia Costa, Professor at INPA (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia) in Brazil, added "This study underscores the uneven impacts of climate change on tree diversity across different tropical forests, highlighting the need for specific monitoring and conservation efforts in each region."

Professor Oliver Phillips from the University of Leeds, who leads the pan-Amazon RAINFOR network, emphasised the significant threat posed by deforestation: "Our findings stress the vital links between preserving forests, protecting biodiversity, and fighting climate change. It is especially critical to protect remaining forests where the Amazon meets the Andes. Only if they stay standing can they offer a long-term home to species in adjacent lowlands.”

The research team plans to continue their work to better understand the impacts of climate change on tropical tree diversity.  

Dr Fadrique added: “Future studies will focus on complex compositional questions, including the taxonomic and functional identities of species being lost or recruited, and whether this points to a large-scale process of homogenisation within the Andes-Amazon region”

The work was an international collaboration involving more than 160 researchers from 20 countries with many contributions coming from South American universities and partners. It benefited from the support of large research collectives, including RAINFOR, Red de Bosques Andinos, the Madidi Project, and the PPBio network.

The paper, titled "Tree Diversity is Changing Across Tropical Andean and Amazonian Forests in Response to Global Change", is available in Nature Ecology and Evolution: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02956-5

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Journal

Nature Ecology & Evolution

Article Publication Date

23-Jan-2026