Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

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Abdominal pain, fever and unexplained bleeding – which are commonly believed to indicate infection with the Ebola virus — are not significantly predictive of the disease, according to the results of a study examining a new Ebola Prediction Score published online Friday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Derivation and Internal Validation of the Ebola Prediction Score for Risk Stratification of Patients with Suspected Ebola Virus Disease") http://www.annemergmed.com/article/S0196-0644(15)00217-6/fulltext.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: education, children's health, autism, obesity, smoking, weight loss, LHC re-start, malaria, food safety, kidney disease, and avian flu.

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New research from The University of Manchester and the Institute of Zoology has shed light on the complex challenge facing scientists battling one of the world’s most devastating animal diseases.

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Candida albicans causes potentially lethal infections in immunocompromised individuals. Now, using a modified CRISPR-Cas system, Whitehead researchers can edit the fungus’s genome systematically—an approach that could help identify potential drug targets.

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Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant superbug, can cause life-threatening skin, bloodstream and surgical site infections or pneumonia. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine now report that cigarette smoke may make matters worse. The study, published March 30 by Infection and Immunity, shows that MRSA bacteria exposed to cigarette smoke become even more resistant to killing by the immune system.

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The intervention was found to be feasible and acceptable. Eight months post-baseline, intervention participants tended to be more likely to evidence “good” (that is, 7 day a week) adherence assessed via hair sample analysis (60% among intervention arm participants vs. 26.7% among controls), and also had lower HIV viral load levels based on the medical record than controls, at a statistically significant level (a difference of 0.88 log10 viral load), both large effect sizes. Thus the intervention components were highly promising, and merit further study with this vulnerable population.

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Michael Neely, MD, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, helps explain the facts about measles, and how parents can prevent further outbreak. MD, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, helps explain the facts about measles, how parents can prevent further outbreak, and what CHLA can do to help prevent infection and to treat those who have already been infected.

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Giving fewer antibiotic injections to young infants in the developing world with severe infections such as pneumonia and sepsis is just as safe and effective as the standard course of twice daily injections over the course of a week, according to new Johns Hopkins School of Public Health research conducted in Bangladesh.

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“Older mosquitoes are potentially more dangerous because they have had a greater chance of becoming infected with pathogens, like dengue or chikungunya viruses, and so may transmit that pathogen to people.”

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Frequently used approaches to understanding and forecasting emerging epidemics—including the West African Ebola outbreak—can lead to big errors that mask their own presence, according to a University of Michigan ecologist and his colleagues.

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HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)-positive kidney transplant patients experienced superior outcomes when compared to kidney transplant patients with Hepatitis C and those infected with both HIV and Hepatitis C, according to a study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and published online in Kidney International.

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A key protein previously implicated in Lou Gehrig’s disease and other neurological diseases plays an important role in the response to viral infection

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Researchers at Upstate Medical University, in collaboration with a team of international investigators studying dengue fever, have discovered new information on climate drivers of the disease and social risk factors that may be contributing to its spread.

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To better understand the variety of Salmonella species harbored by captive reptiles, Staten Island Zoo has teamed up with the microbiology department at Wagner College.

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An Ebola whole virus vaccine, constructed using a novel experimental platform, has been shown to effectively protect monkeys exposed to the often fatal virus. The vaccine, described today (March 26, 2015) in the journal Science, was developed by a group led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a University of Wisconsin-Madison expert on avian influenza, Ebola and other viruses of medical importance.

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A new tissue culture model using human white blood cells shows how people with a latent – or symptom-free – tuberculosis infection are protected from active disease by a critical early step in their immune response, researchers say.

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Most children with HIV who have low levels of a key immune cell eventually recover levels of this cell after they begin treatment.

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Antibiotic resistance is poised to spread globally among bacteria frequently implicated in respiratory and urinary infections in hospital settings, according to new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

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Children with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), a common virus that infects the lungs and breathing passageways, has been on the rise across the nation for the last several years. Though it may only produce minor cold symptoms in adults, it can lead to serious illness in young children and those with compromised immune systems.

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Research led by scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has identified key molecules that trigger the immune system to launch an attack on the bacterium that causes tularemia. The research was published online March 16 in Nature Immunology.

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The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has approved the use of the hollow fiber system for the development of drugs to treat and prevent tuberculosis (TB). The hollow fiber system model of TB was developed about 12 years ago by Tawanda Gumbo, MD, investigator at Baylor Research Institute.

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Half a century ago, a concentrated global effort nearly wiped a disfiguring tropical disease from the face of the earth. Now, says Case Western Reserve’s James W. Kazura, MD, it’s time to complete the work.

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In a groundbreaking study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Michigan State University’s Dr. Terrie Taylor and her team discovered what causes death in children with cerebral malaria, the deadliest form of the disease.

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Faisal Shuaib, M.D., Dr.P.H., who led successful Ebola containment efforts in Nigeria, has been appointed to a six-man independent expert committee.

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University of Utah biologists report how a disposable molecular ruler or tape measure determines the length of needles bacteria use to infect cells. The findings have potential applications for new antibiotics and anticancer drugs and for helping people how to design nanomachines.

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Findings by a Saint Louis University researcher parallel earlier results: Adding a strain of influenza B could improve effectiveness of an influenza vaccine.

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Case Western Reserve researchers are part of an international team that has discovered that Valacyclovir reduces HIV-1 levels — even when patients do not have herpes. Results were published online in Clinical Infectious Disease.

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An international study involving the University of Southampton suggests there could be a rise in measles cases of 100,000 across the three countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa due to health system disruptions.

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Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say that major disruptions in the health care systems in West Africa caused by the Ebola crisis have led to significant decreases in vaccinations for childhood diseases, increasing susceptibility to measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses.

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Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have analyzed a key protein from two influenza strains that recently began causing sporadic infections among people in China and Taiwan. The analyses suggest the flu viruses have not acquired changes allowing them to infect people easily.

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Using a specially selected library of different hepatitis C viruses, a team of researchers led by Johns Hopkins scientists has identified tiny differences in the pathogens’ outer shell proteins that underpin their resistance to antibodies. The findings, reported in the January 2015 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, suggest a reason why some patients’ immune systems can’t fend off hepatitis C infections, and they reveal distinct challenges for those trying to craft a successful vaccine to prevent them.

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The new vaccine was found to be effective against the two most common forms of herpes that cause cold sores (HSV-1) and genital ulcers (HSV-2). Both are known to infect the body’s nerve cells, where the virus can lay dormant for years before symptoms reappear. The new vaccine is the first to prevent this type of latent infection.

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Chlorine, a disinfectant used in most wastewater treatment plants, may be failing to eliminate pharmaceuticals from wastes. As a result, trace levels get discharged from the treatment plants into waterways. Now, scientists are reporting that chlorine treatment may encourage the formation of new, unknown antibiotics that could enter the environment, potentially contributing to the problem of antibiotic resistance. They will present the research at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

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Since HIV emerged in the ‘80s, drug “cocktails” transformed the deadly disease into a manageable one. But the virus is adept at developing resistance to drugs, and treatment regimens require tweaking that can be costly. Now scientists at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society are announcing new progress toward affordable drugs that could potentially thwart the virus’s ability to resist them.

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Salk scientists re-engineered the bacterial defense system CRISPR to recognize HIV inside human cells and destroy the virus, offering a potential new therapy.

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Armed with a microscope capable of zooming in on organisms measured in billionths of a meter, scientists report they are the first to observe one of the tiny molecular machines that bacteria use to infect host cells. Findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The focus will be on Ebola genomics and the study of the next generation of DNA sequencing technologies used to study the disease.

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Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have designed a new type of vaccine that could be the first-ever for preventing genital herpes—one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, affecting 500 million people worldwide. Using a counterintuitive approach, researchers were able to prevent both infections caused by herpes simplex virus type 2, which causes genital herpes. Findings from the research, conducted in mice, were published today in the online journal eLife.

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Why do we shake hands? Why do animals smell each other? These actions apparently serve the same evolutionary purpose. A study by Prof. Noam Sobel’s lab at the Weizmann Institute shows that after shaking someone’s hand, we subconsciously sniff our own hands twice as much as we normally do –which hand we sniff depends on the other person’s gender.

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To help the public better understand how measles can spread, an NIH-funded team of infectious disease computer modelers at the University of Pittsburgh has launched a free, mobile-friendly tool that lets users simulate measles outbreaks in cities across the country.

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Two of the four known groups of human AIDS viruses (HIV-1 groups O and P) have originated in western lowland gorillas, according to an international team of scientists.

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The cascade of events leading to bacterial infection and the immune response is mostly understood. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the immune response to the bacteria that causes tuberculosis have remained a mystery — until now. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have now uncovered how a bacterial molecule controls the body’s response to TB infection and suggest that adjusting the level of this of this molecule may be a new way to treat the disease. The report appears this week as an advance online publication of Nature Medicine.

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An aggressive campaign to reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics has helped cut the rate of infection with a dangerous drug-resistant bacteria at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, by nearly 40 percent.

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Sexual biology may be the key to uncovering why Anopheles mosquitoes are unique in their ability to transmit malaria to humans, according to researchers at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and University of Perugia, Italy.

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New research that focuses on the mechanism by which Ebola virus infects a cell and the discovery of a promising drug therapy candidate is being published February 27, 2015, in the journal Science.

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Researchers at Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and The Scripps Research Institute for the first time have shown how human antibodies can neutralize the Marburg virus, a close cousin to Ebola.

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The Scripps Research Institute scientists have captured the first images showing how immune molecules bind to a site on the surface of Marburg virus and have described an antibody that binds to both Marburg and Ebola viruses, pointing to new antibody treatments to fight an entire family of viruses.