Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

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Mathematical model suggests new malaria control approach could work as well as insecticides

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When you find yourself in an eerie place or the beat drops just right during a favorite song, the chills start multiplying. You know the feeling. It is a shiver that seems to come from within and makes your hairs stand on end.

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HIV policy experts have released the first of two reports to help prevent HIV in communities of color.

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A new Northwestern Medicine study shows the benefits of a partner frequently checking for troublesome moles based on training to do so far outweigh the embarrassment. Study participants who received skin examination training caught far more mole irregularities than those in the control group. They also grew more confident performing the examinations.

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The 2017 SOT Awards recipients have studied the role of pesticide exposure on neurodegenerative diseases, connections between chemicals and the susceptibility to allergies and asthma, risk assessment, alternative test methods and strategies, and more, in their efforts to improve public, animal and environmental health.

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As scientists race to create a vaccine for the Zika virus, new research from the University of Georgia suggests almost half of Americans wouldn’t be interested in getting the shot even if public health officials recommended it for them.

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Dr. Hans Wildschutte, biology, has his eye on finding answers to the serious global issues of antibiotic resistance and novel drug discovery. The research in Wildschutte’s lab focuses on finding environmental bacteria that can kill one or multiple pathogens.

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The chronic lung inflammation that is a hallmark of cystic fibrosis, has, for the first time, been linked to a new class of bacterial enzymes that hijack the patient’s immune response and prevent the body from calling off runaway inflammation, according to a laboratory investigation led by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

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An investigation by Southern Research biologists reveals for the first time that fatty acids known as oxylipins play a critical role in the formation of the biofilm shield that protects disease-causing bacteria from antibiotics.

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A Michigan State University research team is the first to show how a common bacterium found in improperly cooked chicken causes Guillain-Barre Syndrome, or GBS. The federally funded research, now published in the Journal of Autoimmunity, not only demonstrates how this food-borne bacterium, known as Campylobacter jejuni, triggers GBS, but offers new information for a cure.

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Spread holiday greetings, not the flu, this season.

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The changing weather brings about many things: holiday excitement, a different wardrobe and—perhaps most annoyingly—cold and flu season. Those around you have likely been sneezing more frequently, which may have prompted you to ponderif it is possible to sneeze with your eyes open.

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New genetic research from an international team including McMaster University, University of Helsinki, Vilnius University and the University of Sydney, suggests that smallpox, a pathogen that caused millions of deaths worldwide, may not be an ancient disease but a much more modern killer that went on to become the first human disease eradicated by vaccination.

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This year, TMA offered half a million dollars in new funding for research into causes, treatments, and cures for rare myositis diseases.

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Since the inception of its research funding program in 2002, the Myositis Association has approved 50 research projects, including grants and fellowships totaling nearly $6 million.

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In a new study, researchers have modified a rabies virus, so that it has a protein from the MERS virus; this altered virus works as a 2-for-1 vaccine that protects mice against both Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and rabies.

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The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recently awarded a $2.4 million grant to study a theory that could prevent thousands of C. difficile infections, relapses and deaths all over the world. Beaumont Health has developed a medical animation to help illustrate the research study.

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Magnets instead of antibiotics could provide a possible new treatment method for blood infection. This involves the blood of patients being mixed with magnetic iron particles, which bind the bacteria to them after which they are removed from the blood using magnets. The initial laboratory tests at Empa in St. Gallen have been successful, and seem promising.

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A Queen’s University Belfast expert is leading a €4m international initiative to investigate whether natural toxins and manmade chemicals are creating potentially dangerous mixtures that affect our natural hormones and cause major illnesses such as cancer, obesity, diabetes or infertility.

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A team of scientists led by Julie Saba, MD, PhD at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, has unveiled a novel role of thymic dendritic cells, which could result in new strategies to treat conditions such as autoimmune diseases, immune deficiencies, prematurity, infections, cancer, and the loss of immunity after bone marrow transplantation.