Infectious Disease

It remains mysterious why humans get infected by some bacterial or viral pathogens relatively easily while animals that have very similar tissues and immune functions do not. This chasm also is the reason why researchers frequently face problems in their efforts to model pathogenic diseases in animal models, such as mice, and why drugs developed…

Scientists looking at the genetics of Zika virus have found a way to fast-track research which could lead to new vaccines. The study, led by The University of Queensland and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, used a new technique to uncover Zika mutations that help foster virus replication in mosquito hosts, while hindering its ability…

For decades, one of the strongest weapons against malaria has been a one-two punch: low-tech mosquito bed nets to physically block biting, treated with deadly insecticides to kill the mosquitoes. With widespread use of this combination, malaria deaths have dropped significantly — though nearly 445,000 people died from the disease in 2016 alone. But now…

A London man appears to be free of the AIDS virus after a stem cell transplant, the second success including the “Berlin patient,” doctors reported. The therapy had an early success with Timothy Ray Brown, a U.S. man treated in Germany who is 12 years post-transplant and still free of HIV. Until now, Brown is…

A group of scientists in Denmark is trying to get one step ahead in the battle against antibiotic resistance. Today, many disease-causing bacteria acquire resistance genes, which make antibiotic treatment ineffective. Especially, one gene, CTX-M-15, encoding an extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) can lead to resistance in E. coli causing urinary tract infections. The team of researchers at…

A team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety in Griffin has developed a machine-learning approach that could lead to quicker identification of the animal source of certain Salmonella outbreaks. In the research, published in the January 2019 issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Xiangyu Deng and his colleagues used…

In a world where we can travel the globe by jet, diseases that were once thought to plague faraway places can now strike close to home. The U.S. had to learn this the hard way. In 2014, a patient harboring Ebola returned home to Dallas, Texas from Liberia. Within 15 days of this person’s arrival,…

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered that antibodies that may form the basis of a universal flu vaccine inhibit a second viral protein in addition to the one that they bind. The study, to be published January 25 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, reveals that antibodies that recognize the viral surface…

Fever is known to help power up our immune cells, and scientists in Shanghai have new evidence explaining how. They found in mice that fever alters surface proteins on immune cells like lymphocytes to make them better able to travel via blood vessels to reach the site of infection. Their work appears on January 15…

Led by researchers at RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland), a team of researchers has developed a new treatment for tuberculosis (TB). This work could offer a practical treatment that has the potential to be scaled-up and mass-produced for clinical testing. The treatment, which patients will take using an inhaler, works by reducing the…