Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

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A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that smokers, who wouldn’t typically be diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, are still showing symptoms consistent with the diagnosis.

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In a study of nearly 500,000 individuals in 22 countries, researchers could not find any evidence that these programs had an impact on changing individual behavior.

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Depressed Moms Not ‘in Sync’ with Their Kids, Children with ADHD Sleep Both Poorly and Less, Yeast Infection Linked to Mental Illness, and more in the Mental Health News Source

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Building on their groundbreaking research, Temple University scientists make another breakthrough in a potential cure for HIV.

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Antibiotic-resistant bacteria most often are associated with hospitals and other health-care settings, but a new study indicates that chicken coops and sewage treatment plants also are hot spots of antibiotic resistance.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues in Brazil and Senegal, have described the first “direct experimental proof” that the Brazilian strain of Zika virus can actually cause severe birth defects. The findings are published in the May 11 online issue of Nature.

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Two mouse models of Zika virus infection in pregnancy have been developed by a team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. In them, the virus migrated from the pregnant mouse’s bloodstream into the placenta and then to the brains of the developing pups.

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More comprehensive approaches to care needed, according to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

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A study from the Department of Population Health at NYULMC and New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), led by Scheidell, is the first to examine the association between borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the risk for HIV and other STIs in an adult male criminal justice population.

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Evidence is mounting that the current outbreak of yellow fever is becoming the latest global health emergency, say two Georgetown University professors, who call on the World Health Organization to convene an emergency committee under the International Health Regulations

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Doctors working hundreds of miles away from the nearest hospital could soon have a way to quickly detect Zika virus in blood or saliva samples for less than a dollar per patient. In a proof-of-concept demonstration published May 6 in Cell, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering researchers at Harvard University show how a new Zika diagnostic, which can be freeze-dried and stored for up to a year, successfully detects the virus in the serum of infected macaques.

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For the first time, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have determined one way Zika virus infection can damage developing brain cells. The study, published May 6 in Cell Stem Cell, also shows that inhibiting this mechanism reduces brain cell damage, hinting at a new therapeutic approach to mitigating the effects of prenatal Zika virus infection.

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Antibiotic use in acute and long-term care facilities is a focus of UAB’s antibiotic stewardship program.

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May is National Hepatitis Awareness Month. The CDC has designated May 19th, 2016 as National Hepatitis Testing Day in the U.S. This campaign is particularly timely this year given the report released this Wednesday by the CDC which states that new infections and deaths caused by Hepatitis C (HCV) are at the highest rates ever reported.

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A team of researchers led by McMaster University’s Charu Kaushic has revealed for the first time how estradiol, a female sex hormone present during the menstrual cycle and found in oral contraceptives, may work to protect women against sexually transmitted viral infections.

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Children infected even just once with a certain type of waterborne parasite are nearly three times as likely to suffer from moderate or severe stunted growth by the age of two than those who are not – regardless of whether their infection made them feel sick, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-led research suggests.

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University of California, Irvine’s high-containment biosafety level 3 training laboratory has been selected as the third facility in the U.S. designated by the National Institutes of Health’s National Biosafety & Biocontainment Training Program to provide continuing education to professionals.

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In a study prompted in part by suggestions from people with mental illness, Johns Hopkins researchers found that a history of Candida yeast infections was more common in a group of men with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder than in those without these disorders, and that women with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who tested positive for Candida performed worse on a standard memory test than women with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who had no evidence of past infection.

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WSU scientists discover mechanism critical to pathogens' success.

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Recently developed treatments that cure hepatitis C virus (HCV) will create new opportunities for people with other liver diseases to receive transplanted livers. Only one-third of Americans who need liver transplants receive them and shortages are expected to rise as the transplant waiting list continues to grow even as the supply of organs remains flat.

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When It Comes to Spring Allergies, Oak Pollen More Potent Than Pine; Food Allergies of Low-Income Kids Are Poorly Managed; Flowers Not to Blame for Allergies, and More in the Allergies Channel

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The number of new HIV infections and the transmission rate in the United States dropped by 11 and 17 percent, respectively, between 2010 and 2015, but fell short of the goals put forth by President Obama’s U.S. National HIV/AIDS Strategy.

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A study found that 97 percent of confirmed flu cases among babies 6 months and younger occurred in those whose moms were not vaccinated while they were pregnant.

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A U.S. government agency whose mission is to help save the lives of people around the world living with HIV and AIDS has seen a steep drop in funding for an important part of its budget. The finding, from a UCLA study, could be a cause for concern because many countries rely on the agency to help pay for vital health care services for people with the disease.

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The University of Georgia’s Mark Ebell wasn’t impressed with research on infectious mononucleosis when he wrote his first published review on it back in the 1990s. He still isn’t—a subject he discusses in the April issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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High risk, potentially cancer causing human papillomavirus infections are common among women in Papua New Guinea. But self sampling with vaginal swabs may provide materials that screen as accurately as the more labor-intensive approach using cervical samples obtained by clinicians. This finding is critical to developing same day screening and treatment, which is key to ensuring that women with precancerous lesions are treated in this largely unconnected (electronically) country, and in others like it. The research appeared online April 13, 2016 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, which is published by the American Society for Microbiology.

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Ebola virus samples taken from patients in Liberia in June 2015 are strikingly similar in their genetic makeup to other Ebola virus sequences from Western Africa, according to research published online today in the journal Science Advances. The study sheds light on several aspects of the "flare-ups" that have occurred in Liberia since the country was initially declared free of Ebola virus disease.

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Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai say that tiny doses of a cancer drug may stop the raging, uncontrollable immune response to infection that leads to sepsis and kills up to 500,000 people a year in the U.S.

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The Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) is the largest gathering of eye and vision researchers in the world, with over 11,000 attendees from more than 75 countries. Two free events will feature speakers highlighting recent successes — and emerging threats — facing ophthalmic clinicians and researchers around the world.

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Whilst countries in the tropics and subtropics exhibit diverse patterns of seasonal flu activity, they can be grouped into eight geographical zones to optimise vaccine formulation and delivery timing, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Siddhivinayak Hirve from the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, and colleagues.

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Pinellas County a Model for Mosquito-Borne Disease Surveillance, Scientists Unravel the Genetic Evolution of Zika Virus, Worm Infection Counters Inflammatory Bowel Disease and more in the Infectious Diseases News Source

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An effective vaccine against the virus that causes genital herpes has evaded researchers for decades. But now, researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago working with scientists from Germany have shown that zinc-oxide nanoparticles shaped like jacks can prevent the virus from entering cells, and help natural immunity to develop.

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The Zika virus was present in Haiti several months before the first Zika cases were identified in Brazil, according to new research by infectious-disease specialists at the University of Florida.

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A study shows that when human cells are exposed to titanium dioxide without the presence of UV light from the sun, the risk for bacterial infection more than doubles.

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Honey bee colonies in the United States are in decline, due in part to the ill effects of voracious mites, fungal gut parasites and a wide variety of debilitating viruses. Researchers from the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently completed the first comprehensive, multi-year study of honey bee parasites and disease as part of the National Honey Bee Disease Survey. The findings reveal some alarming patterns, but provide at least a few pieces of good news as well.

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While norovirus is often linked in the news to outbreaks on cruise ships, the highly contagious stomach bug sickens nearly 700 million around the world every year and results in roughly $4.2 billion in health care costs and $60.3 billion in societal costs annually, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

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Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have solved the structure of the biological machinery used by a common virus to recognize and attack human host cells. The new structure gives scientists the first view of the glycoprotein of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus.

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As the threat of the Zika virus rips through the Americas and news headlines, another more deadly tropical disease is also on the move: Leishmaniasis is a parasitic infection that currently endangers an estimated 350 million people around the world. By combining two decades of research, ancient tribal medicine and the latest in gene editing technology – a team of scientists is creating what could be the first ever live-attenuated vaccine to prevent Leishmaniasis both here and abroad.

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The findings, published in the journal Vaccine, suggest administering vaccinations in the morning, rather than the afternoon, could induce greater, and thus more protective, antibody responses.

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Soy isoflavones and peptides may inhibit the growth of microbial pathogens that cause food-borne illnesses, according to a new study from University of Guelph researchers.

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An international team of including the Lomonosov Moscow State University researchers discovered which enzyme enables Escherichia coli bacterium (E. coli) to breathe. The study is published in the Scientific Reports.

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Harvard Medical School scientists have found a compound that in laboratory dishes blocks the dengue virus in two ways, raising hopes for a future drug whose dual activity could suppress the otherwise likely emergence of drug resistance. The HMS team, led by Priscilla Yang, an HMS associate professor of microbiology and immunobiology, reported its findings April 21 in Cell Chemical Biology.