Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

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Endangered great apes get malaria, just like humans. New evidence from wild bonobos shows us the infection harms them, too.

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Archaeologists know that people have practiced cranial trephination, a medical procedure that involves cutting a hole in the skull, for thousands of years.

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A new University of California, Irvine-led study uncovers how a protein, APOBEC3B, could protects cells against many different types of RNA viruses like respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), SARS-CoV2, influenza virus, poliovirus and measles, helping to prevent disease. The study was published in Nature Communications.

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Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and The Johns Hopkins University have created and preliminarily tested what they believe may be one of the first models for predicting who has the highest probability of being resistant to COVID-19 in spite of exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes it.

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A new Australian study led by SAHMRI and Flinders University has uncovered fundamental differences in how the AstraZeneca and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines impact the immune system.

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Enhanced disinfectant is two-to-four times more effective in neutralizing pathogen threat

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A supervised, eight-week exercise program improved symptoms of patients with long COVID better than the current standard self-managed rehabilitation recommendations. The study is published ahead of print in the Journal of Applied Physiology and was chosen as an APSselect article for February.

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Below are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Chemistry news channel on Newswise.

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Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have generated the first induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from bats, gaining valuable insights into the close relationship between bats and viruses.

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Regional differences in the spread of Japan’s two main ancestral groups have been revealed, thanks to new research at the University of Tokyo. Japanese people are generally thought to descend from two main groups: Jomon hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers from continental East Asia.

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Analyzing the most extensive datasets in the U.S., researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have revealed that vaccination against COVID-19 is associated with fewer heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular issues among people who were infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The research letter, “Impact of Vaccination on Major Adverse Cardiovascular Events in Patients with COVID-19 Infection,” was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on February 20. The research will also be presented on March 5, 2023 in a poster session in New Orleans, LA, at the American College of Cardiology’s 72nd Annual Scientific Session Together With World Heart Federation’s World Congress of Cardiology.

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ROCKVILLE, MD – The virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-CoV-2, uses its spike protein in order to stick to and infect our cells. The final step for the virus to enter our cells is for part of its spike protein to act like a twist tie, forcing the host cell’s outer membrane to fuse with the virus. Kailu Yang, in the lab of Axel Brunger, colleagues at Stanford University, and collaborators at University of California Berkely, Harvard Medical School, and University of Finland have generated a molecule based on the twisted part of the spike protein (called HR2), which sticks itself onto the virus and prevents the spike protein from twisting.

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ROCKVILLE, MD – COVID-19 infections can cause potentially life-threatening heart issues. Studies suggest that people with COVID-19 are 55% more likely to suffer a major adverse cardiovascular event, including heart attack, stroke and death, than those without COVID-19. They’re also more likely to have other heart issues, like arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle).

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Although the public had been alerted that this winter could be a potentially bad flu season, barely half of Americans said in January that they had received a flu shot, a vaccination level unchanged in a representative national panel from the comparable period last year.

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This study shows vaccination against COVID-19 is an essential strategy to improve outcomes in this high-risk population. The results support guidelines that patients with cancer should receive at least 3 COVID-19 vaccine doses.

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The United States, the largest importer of wildlife in the world, is not prepared for future spread of animal-borne, or zoonotic, diseases due to gaps among governmental agencies designed to combat these threats, concludes a new analysis by researchers at Harvard Law School and New York University.

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A team at UNC Charlotte and Tuple, a Charlotte-based genomics consulting firm, has used artificial intelligence to rapidly assess the public health implications of the newly emergent SARS-CoV-2 XBB.1.5 variant. Results from simulations run by the team indicate the antibodies currently in our arsenal are effective to neutralize SARS-CoV-2 XBB.1.5.

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Internationally renowned expert will focus on growing St. Jude into a global leader in infectious diseases research.

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The SLAS Discovery Editor's Top 10 annually showcases ten individual articles that stand out as the most innovative scientific achievements published in SLAS Discovery in the past 12 months.

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UMD Smith’s Gerald Suarez examines post-pandemic employer-worker dynamics.

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A recent study performed in Zambia by University of Maryland School of Medicine’s (UMSOM) Institute of Human Virology researchers found that high uptake of HIV preventative medicine, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), is possible in prison populations with adequate resources and support from the criminal justice health system.

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The National Institutes of Health has awarded $3.8 million to Texas Biomedical Research Institute to further develop a promising HIV vaccine candidate that stops the virus upon entry, before it begins rapidly spreading throughout the body.

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Researchers reporting in ACS Infectious Diseases have developed a procedure that could help researchers catch up to microbes which can rapidly mutate and evade detection and treatment. Their “AutoPLP” technique designs nucleic acid probes to detect new variants quickly, accurately and easily.

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Based on data that span the past 120 years, scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found that the mosquitoes responsible for transmitting malaria in Africa are spreading deeper into southern Africa and to higher elevations than previously recorded. The researchers estimate that Anopheles mosquito populations in sub-Saharan Africa have gained an average of 6.5 meters (21 feet) of elevation per year, and the southern limits of their ranges moved south of the equator by 4.7 kilometers (nearly 3 miles) per year.

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A new grant of over $17 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has established La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) as the leading institute for human immunology data curation, analysis, and dissemination. With this funding, LJI has taken the helm of the Human Immunology Project Consortium Data Coordinating Center, a critical tool in the effort to fuel scientific collaboration in immunoprofiling and highlight findings from the overall Human Immunology Project Consortium (HIPC).

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Investigators in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai have confirmed that people who have had COVID-19 have an increased risk for new-onset diabetes—the most significant contributor to cardiovascular disease.

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“A potential pathway between obesity and these stressors could be related to weight bias and stigma; there was extensive media coverage highlighting obesity as a potential risk factor for COVID-19 mortality which may have increased weight stigma,” the researchers wrote. The study examined data from nearly 24,000 participants enrolled in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), who were between the ages of 50 and 96 during the first year of the pandemic. The participants completed the CLSA COVID-19 Questionnaire Study, which collected longitudinal data from April to December 2020. The researchers also used data collected before the pandemic to examine if childhood adversity, such as abuse and neglect, was a factor that modified the relationship between obesity and stress.

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A newly published animal study found that chronic alcohol consumption may create conditions in the body that can facilitate infection by SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease. The study, published in Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, found that chronic alcohol use increased the levels of an enzyme that helps the virus enter the cells and, therefore, may increase the risk for COVID-19.

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Two common wild plants contain extracts that inhibit the ability of the virus that causes COVID-19 to infect living cells, an Emory University study finds.

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University of Sydney scientists have discovered a protein in the lung that blocks SARS-CoV-2 infection and forms a natural protective barrier in the human body.

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Viruses use the molecular repertoire of the host cell to replicate. Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation2 at the University of Bonn, together with Japanese researchers, want to exploit this for the treatment of influenza.

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Thinking beyond COVID-19, a team led by Srikanth Singamaneni at the McKelvey School of Engineering developed a new point-of-care diagnostic test that is 1,000 times more sensitive than conventional rapid tests and can quantify concentrations of proteins.

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Researchers have developed an inhalable powder that could protect lungs and airways from viral invasion by reinforcing the body’s own mucosal layer.

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Researchers tested lambda’s effectiveness using a randomized placebo-controlled trial involving adults with COVID-19 from both Canada and Brazil, who freely volunteered for the study. A total of 931 people received lambda and 1,018 received a placebo. Eighty-three per cent of the trial participants were vaccinated. Researchers ran the lambda trial from June 2021 to March 2022.

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A single-dose of the antiviral drug peginterferon lambda reduced by half the risk of hospitalization or a visit to the Emergency Department due to COVID-19, according to a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Spike proteins are one of the main targets for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. But those remedies gradually lose effectiveness when the spike proteins mutate. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Science that they have discovered small molecules that target other segments that mutate less.

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A Cornell University economist conducted an experiment with nearly 700 people in three countries to gauge the public’s perception of relative risk factors.