Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

• share
• favorite_border

The H1N1 influenza pandemic has led to a sharp increase in the number of children with a serious "secondary" bacterial infection called empyema in children, suggests a study in the October issue of The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, and pharmacy.

• share
• favorite_border

In a survey of Chicago-area healthcare facilities, researchers at Rush University Medical Center and the Cook County Department of Public Health have found that the incidence of KPC-producing bacteria is rising. These bugs cause infections with high mortality rates and are resistant to the most commonly used antibiotics.

• share
• favorite_border

To help computational modelers who study the spread of infectious diseases, including flu, researchers at RTI International in North Carolina created a synthetic population mirroring U.S. demographics. Now they’ve added another layer of realism: where the virtual citizens live.

• share
• favorite_border

Chemists led by Mei Hong of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory have discovered the shuttle mechanism that relays protons from a healthy cell into a flu virus. The proton movement is an important part of the flu virus life cycle.

• share
• favorite_border

Beating the flu has always been tough, but it has gotten even more difficult in recent years. Two of the four antiviral drugs used to treat a nasty case of the influenza A virus no longer work.

• share
• favorite_border

The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study effective ways to seek, test, and treat inmates with HIV.

• share
• favorite_border

A recently formed Boston-based start up called HanGenix is the first company to be spun out of the new CIMIT Accelerator program. HanGenix is focused on reducing hospital acquired infections (HAI) by installing comprehensive hand hygiene solutions that remind clinicians to perform proper hand hygiene and document their compliance. The CIMIT Accelerator program facilitates technological innovations that can be handed off to industry within twelve to eighteen months.

• share
• favorite_border

Interaction between 'kiss of death' marker and protein-chopping factory - new target for anti-TB drugs.

• share
• favorite_border

You don’t have to take getting the flu lying down (unless absolutely necessary). That’s why LifeBridge Health has two of the most important ways to prevent someone in your family from catching it.

• share
• favorite_border

Benjamin Luft, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Stony Brook University Medical Center, and a team of medical researchers have determined the genetic blueprint of 13 strains of the bacteria that cause Lyme disease.

• share
• favorite_border

Health system plans to match last year’s effort when 99.3 percent of staff was vaccinated.

• share
• favorite_border

A new University of Michigan study shows that institutions use different methods to measure blood stream infections. Bloodstream infections are the most common hospital-associated infections in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) and a significant source of in-hospital deaths, increased length of stay and added medical costs. The study’s findings, published in the October issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, offer a compelling opportunity for hospitals to improve their CA-BSI surveillance as a means to promote valid comparisons among institutions. Current publicly reported data show that some hospitals report a four-fold difference in infection rates.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have determined the genetic structures of 13 previously unmapped strains of the bacterium that causes Lyme Disease. These findings may accelerate progress toward vaccines and more effective treatments.

• share
• favorite_border

A study by two Florida State University biochemists makes an important contribution to science’s understanding of a serious problem causing concern worldwide: the growing resistance of some harmful bacteria to the drugs that were intended to kill them.

• share
• favorite_border

William R. Jacobs, Jr., Ph.D., professor of microbiology & immunology and of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, has been awarded a three-year, $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a novel genetic strategy for combating tuberculosis (TB). TB causes almost two million deaths each year, making it the world’s most deadly bacterial infection.

• share
• favorite_border

For married couples in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative, antiretroviral therapy (ART) does not reduce the risk of transmitting HIV to the uninfected partner, according to a study from China in the October issue of JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. JAIDS is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals, and institutions in medicine, nursing, allied health, pharmacy and the pharmaceutical industry.

• share
• favorite_border

Loyola physician says this season will be different in several ways.

• share
• favorite_border

Kathleen Alexander discovered that banded mongoose that were living closely with humans in northern Botswana are dying from a novel tuberculosis species.

• share
• favorite_border

New research shows that an intravenous (IV) treatment may cut a person’s risk of dying from bacterial meningitis. The research is published in the September 29, 2010, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The treatment is called dexamethasone.

• share
• favorite_border

In recent human trials for a promising new class of drug designed to target the hepatitis C virus (HCV) without shutting down the immune system, some of the HCV strains being treated exhibited signs of drug resistance.

• share
• favorite_border

Johns Hopkins has a wide range of experts available for interviews and comments about seasonal flu, H1N1, emergency preparedness, infection control, flu transmission in children, vaccine safety, flu treatment, public health ethics, flu in cancer patients, and related public communications strategies. If you would like to interview a Johns Hopkins expert, call or e-mail the designated information officer in the list below.

• share
• favorite_border

By using social networks such as Twitter, researchers can more quickly and inexpensively determine trends in spread of contagious diseases such as influenza.

• share
• favorite_border

While the U.S. has made great progress in the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis, the nation has become more susceptible to potential epidemics of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), according a study led by Johns Hopkins researchers. Computer simulations show that as TB prevalence falls, the risk for more extensive MDR-TB increases. In addition, the simulation also showed that higher detection of TB cases without proper treatment of cases also increased risk.

• share
• favorite_border

The first U.S. National AIDS Strategy "makes epidemiologic sense" and can meet its central goal of achieving a 25 percent reduction in the incidence of AIDS by 2015, according to an editorial in JAIDS: Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers led by Iowa State's Edward Yu have discovered the crystal structures of pumps that allow bacteria to resist heavy metal toxins and antibiotics. Their discovery is reported in the Sept. 23 edition of the journal Nature.

• share
• favorite_border

Newly recognized disease-causing viruses, bacteria, and other infections are continually emerging around the world, posing difficult challenges for patient diagnosis and treatment and for public health responses. A special symposium section of the September issue of The American Journal of the Medical Sciences (AJMS), official journal of the Southern Society for Clinical Investigation, provides a research update on important new infectious pathogens.

• share
• favorite_border

As the United States prepares for the upcoming flu season, a group of researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health continues to model how H1N1 may spread.

• share
• favorite_border

Study finds no significant gender-based differences in response to two anti-HIV drugs and demonstrates it is possible to recruit large numbers of women into clinical trials. But women dropped out of trial at higher rates than men.

• share
• favorite_border

A “test and treat” strategy, the leading proposal by the World Health Organization to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa, is seriously flawed, say UCLA researchers.

• share
• favorite_border

An ancestor of HIV that infects monkeys is thousands of years older than previously thought, suggesting that HIV, which causes AIDS, would take hundreds of lifetimes to naturally evolve into a non-lethal virus.

• share
• favorite_border

Public health officials have long believed that notifying the public about outbreaks of infectious disease could help reduce transmission rates and the overall impact of a pandemic. Now, researchers have modified the most widely used infectious disease model to account for the impact of media coverage.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at UC San Diego and Harvard used a basic feature of social networks to study the 2009 flu epidemic among 744 students. The findings, they say, point to a novel method for early detection of contagious outbreaks.

• share
• favorite_border

Fears over the influenza A virus (H1N1; sometimes referred to as swine flu) have motivated researchers to investigate the antimicrobial activity of the Aganocide® compounds against viruses.

• share
• favorite_border

In a recent study presented at this year’s Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC), a team led by Dr. Dmitri Debabov, head of Cell and Microbiology, and Meghan Zuck, a Research Associate, at NovaBay Pharmaceuticals, reported the development of infected tissue models for its Aganocide® compounds.

• share
• favorite_border

One third of the world’s population is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), which leads to tuberculosis (TB), a leading cause of death world-wide. A new discovery, led by a team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, offers hope for new approaches to the prevention and treatment of TB.

• share
• favorite_border

Dendritic cells are the grand sentinels of the immune system, standing guard 24/7 to detect foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria, and bring news of the invasion to other immune cells to marshal an attack. These sentinels, however, nearly always fail to respond adequately to HIV, the virus causing AIDS. Now a team of scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center has discovered a sensor in dendritic cells that recognizes HIV, spurring a more potent immune response by the sentinels to the virus. They report their findings in the September 9, 2010, issue of Nature.

• share
• favorite_border

Personalized post cards or phone calls can be effective in encouraging more seniors to get their annual flu shots, according to a new review of evidence.

• share
• favorite_border

An analysis of data from influenza cases in Wisconsin indicates individuals with 2009 H1N1 infections were younger than those with H3N2 (2007-2008), and that the risk of most serious complications was not higher in adults or children with 2009 H1N1 compared with recent seasonal strains, according to a study in the September 8 issue of JAMA.

• share
• favorite_border

HIV-infected children in South Africa who were exposed to the drug nevirapine at birth (used to help prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission) and then received a protease inhibitor (PI) for viral suppression achieved lower rates of viremia (virus in the blood stream) if they were switched to nevirapine, compared to children who continued on the PI-based regimen, according to a study in the September 8 issue of JAMA. PI-based therapies generally have a higher cost compared to nevirapine, which may leave some children excluded from treatment.

• share
• favorite_border

An outbreak of measles at an international youth sporting event illustrates the risks of with "imported" measles, according to a study in the September issue of The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.

• share
• favorite_border

New, automated diagnostic test for TB, developed by a public-private partnership including UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School scientists, showed excellent results in a large-scale field trial. The results appear in the Sept. 1 New England Journal of Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reviewed published data to assess HIV-infected children’s immune responses to vaccines and found that most children treated with HAART remained susceptible to vaccine-preventable diseases, but responded well to revaccination.

• share
• favorite_border

An antibacterial peptide looks to be a highly-effective therapy against infections in burn or blast wounds suffered by soldiers.

• share
• favorite_border

It now appears that the malaria mosquito needs more than one family of odor sensors to sniff out its human prey. That is the implication of new research into the mosquito’s sense of smell published in the Aug. 31 issue of the online, open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology.

• share
• favorite_border

The end of smallpox in 1979 has led to a sharp rise in monkeypox, a related but less lethal viral infection. The disease is spreading in Africa, with sporadic outbreaks elsewhere, including the U.S.

• share
• favorite_border

South Dakota State University research is exploring a “fusion strategy” for making improved vaccines to protect pigs and humans against some strains of E. coli. The SDSU researchers altered the toxins produced by a form of E. coli and genetically fused the non-poisonous “toxoid” to a protein known to cause an immune reaction. The resulting “fusion protein” could be used to develop a vaccine.

• share
• favorite_border

Dr. William A. Petri Jr. of the University of Virginia is an authority on Clostridium difficile, a tenacious bacterium that causes half a million infections a year.

• share
• favorite_border

It may soon be possible to identify patients who will develop tuberculosis, as scientists have identified changes in the blood specific to the disease. These findings are from an international study published in the August 19 issue of Nature and conducted by doctors and researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital using blood profiling techniques to understand infections.

• share
• favorite_border

Vitamin A and beta-carotene supplements are unsafe for HIV-positive women who breastfeed because they may boost the excretion of HIV in breast milk---thereby increasing the chances of transmitting the infection to the child, a pair of new studies suggest.

• share
• favorite_border

Fire up the citronella-scented tiki torches, and slather on the DEET: Everybody knows these simple precautions repel insects, notably mosquitoes, whose bites not only itch and irritate, but also transmit diseases such as West Nile virus, malaria and dengue.