Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins say an online “pop quiz” they developed in 2009 shows promising accuracy in predicting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in young women, although not, apparently, in young men.

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Some of the most widely used commercial chemicals to kill bedbugs are not effective because the pesky insects have built up a tolerance to them, according to a team of researchers from Virginia Tech and New Mexico State University.

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University of Iowa researchers are reminding U.S. doctors to watch for two vector-borne and potentially life-threatening diseases that can be passed from mother to child. Though Chagas' disease and Leishmaniasis are generally found in other parts of the world, global travel and migration have made the U.S. vulnerable.

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University of Iowa chemists have revealed the chemistry behind how certain diseases, from anthrax to tuberculosis, replicate. The key lies in the function of a gene absent in humans, called thyX, and its ability to catalyze the DNA building block thymine. Results published in the journal Science.

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During an animal’s embryonic development, a chemical chain reaction known as Hippo directs organs to grow to just the right size and no larger. Now Johns Hopkins researchers working with laboratory flies report that this signaling pathway also plays a role in revving up the insects’ immune systems to combat certain bacterial infections.

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Group A Streptococcus, a pathogen responsible for a variety of diseases, remains a global health burden with an estimated more than half a million deaths annually due to severe infections. University of Notre Dame researchers have found a new avenue to pursue treatment possibilities.

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RNA sequencing could help predict future outbreaks.

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Scientists found HIV is still replicating in lymphoid tissue, even when it is undetectable in the blood of patients on antiretroviral drugs. The findings provide a critical new perspective on how HIV persists in the body despite potent antiretroviral therapy. They also offer a path to a cure and show the importance delivering drugs at effective concentrations where the virus continues to replicate in the patients.

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UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have deciphered how a small protein made by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS manipulates human genes to further its deadly agenda.

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In October 2015, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Universidad de Sucre in Colombia ran the first tests confirming the presence of Zika virus transmission in the South American country. In a study published today, the team documents a disease trajectory that started with nine positive patients and has now spread to more than 13,000 infected individuals in that country.

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Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System report data suggesting that e-cigarettes are toxic to human airway cells, suppress immune defenses and alter inflammation, while at the same time boosting bacterial virulence. The mouse study is published January 25 by the Journal of Molecular Medicine

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The Zika virus, unlike other mosquito-borne viruses such as dengue, is relatively unknown and unstudied. That is set to change since Zika, now spreading through Latin America and the Caribbean, has been associated with an alarming rise in babies born in Brazil with abnormally small heads and brain defects – a condition called microcephaly.

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University of Notre Dame researchers have reported the discovery of a major population of the mosquito species Aedes aegypti, the species capable of carrying tropical diseases such as Zika virus, dengue fever and chikungunya, in a Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C. To add insult to injury, the team identified genetic evidence that these mosquitoes have overwintered for at least the past four years, meaning they are adapting for persistence in a northern climate well out of their normal range.

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New research finds that the most commonly used test for tuberculosis fails to accurately diagnose TB in up to 50 percent of pregnant women who are HIV+. The research published early online in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine is believed to be the first study to compare the accuracy of two TB tests – the Quantiferon Gold In Tube® blood test and the more commonly used TST or tuberculin skin test—in this population. The study “Quantitative IFN-, IL-2 Response and Latent Tuberculosis Test Discordance in HIV-infected Pregnant Women” is also the first study to examine pregnancy’s effect on the body’s response to TB.

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Marine microorganisms play a critical role in capturing atmospheric carbon, but a new study finds much less certainty than previously believed about the populations of the viruses that infect these important organisms.

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An international team of researchers has uncovered new information about the Black Death in Europe and its descendants, suggesting it persisted on the continent over four centuries, re-emerging to kill hundreds of thousands in Europe in separate, devastating waves.

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Zika Virus is spread through bites from the Aedes aegypti mosquito, a primary focus of research for Canisius professor. Costanza, PhD, studies the natural history of these blood-sucking insects to better understand their implications on human health.

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Historical pathogens survived for more than 4 centuries in Europe.

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Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston (UTMB) reported today in the journal Cell that they have isolated human monoclonal antibodies from Ebola survivors which can neutralize multiple species of the virus.

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As the Zika virus captures headlines across the United States, with its possible link to birth defects and the first cases reported in the U.S. (all traced back to overseas travel), it’s an opportune time to review the facts associated with this disease. What is the Zika virus? The Zika virus was first isolated in the Zika forest of Uganda in 1947.

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Researchers, led by Ilir Agalliu, M.D., and Robert Burk, M.D., at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that when human papillomavirus (HPV)-16 is detected in peoples’ mouths, they are 22 times more likely than those without HPV-16 to develop a common type of head and neck cancer.

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Our ability to fight off recurrent infections, such as a colds or flu, may lie in the ‘immunological memory’ found in a newly discovered class of gene regulatory elements, according to research from the University of Birmingham, supported by the BBSRC and Bloodwise.

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Researchers at Duke Health are fine-tuning a test that can determine whether a respiratory illness is caused by infection from a virus or bacteria so that antibiotics can be more precisely prescribed.

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USGS identifies research and management actions

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How you ask is a critical part of the process and crucial to providing patient centered care.

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Physicians have known for years that patients respond differently to vaccines as they age. There may soon be a new way to predict and enhance the effectiveness of vaccinations, in particular the hepatitis B vaccine.

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Mayo Clinic has added robots in its fight against Clostridium difficile (C-diff) bacteria.

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Estrogen dramatically reduced the amount of flu virus that replicated in infected cells from women but not from men, a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows.

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Plasma cells play a key role in our immune system. Now scientists at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria, and at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne, Australia, succeeded in characterizing a central regulator of plasma cell function. The results of both teams are published in two back-to-back papers in “Nature Immunology” today.

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When a child comes home from preschool with a stomach bug that threatens to sideline the whole family for days, why do some members of the family get sick while others are unscathed? According to a Duke Health study published January 19 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a person’s resistance to certain germs, specifically E. coli bacteria, could come down to their very DNA.

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Biophysicists have discovered why the bacteria that cause tuberculosis (TB) are naturally somewhat resistant to antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones. Their findings also suggest how drug developers can make fluoroquinolones more efficacious against mutations that make the lung disease drug resistant.

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In the ever-escalating evolutionary battle with drug-resistant bacteria, humans may soon have a leg up thanks to adaptive, light-activated nanotherapy developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Given that antibiotics are losing effectiveness faster than replacements are being found, Washington University in St. Louis chemist Timothy Wencewicz suggests we try a new approach. Drugs that hobble the production of virulence factors, small molecules that help bacteria to establish an infection in a host, would put much less selective pressure on bacteria and delay the evolution of resistance. In the journal Infectious Diseases, he describes recent work on a target virulence factor.