Feature Channels: Infectious Diseases

• share
• favorite_border

One in seven parents have given their child over-the-counter allergy medicine labeled for adults.

• share
• favorite_border

Dr. Alessandro Sette’s team at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology has been named Best Academic Research Team as part of the 10th Vaccine Industry Excellence Awards at this year’s World Vaccine Congress 2017 held in Washington. The ViE Awards celebrate the outstanding contributions and achievements of leaders who continually set standards of excellence and advocacy in vaccine development.

• share
• favorite_border

Investigators examined the relationship between injection drug use and immune activation in a sample of HIV infected and uninfected PWID. Findings suggest that efforts to encourage injection cessation or reduction in frequency can have positive health benefits through reducing immune activation.

• share
• favorite_border

An international effort to analyze the entire database of Ebola virus genomes from the 2013-2016 West African epidemic reveals insights into factors that sped or slowed the rampage and calls for using real-time sequencing and data-sharing to contain future viral disease outbreaks.

• share
• favorite_border

As the World Health Organization steps up its efforts to eradicate a once-rampant tropical disease, a University of Washington study suggests that monitoring, and potentially treating, the monkeys that co-exist with humans in affected parts of the world may be part of the global strategy.

• share
• favorite_border

Bacteria are everywhere. And despite widespread belief, not all bacteria are “bad.” However, to combat those that can cause health issues for humans, there has been an over-reliance on the use of antibiotics – so much so, that many of them are now proving ineffective due to bacteria developing increased resistance to them. This paradigm led researchers at NSU to take another look at how bacteria do what they do to see if there was another way to approach this issue.

• share
• favorite_border

A research breakthrough allowing the first direct, empirical, blood-based, cow-side test for diagnosing bovine tuberculosis (TB) could spare ranchers and the agriculture industry from costly quarantines and the mass slaughter of animals infected with this easily spread disease.

• share
• favorite_border

Dr. Robert Davey, Scientist at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, is part of a team of researchers working to find new drugs that will stop Ebola virus from growing inside infected cells. Dr. Christopher Basler, a professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University, has received a five-year, $4.1 million federal grant for this project.

• share
• favorite_border

Professor Michael Farzan, co-chair of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has received $4.8 million in funding through a 2017 Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS research from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The new funding will support a five-year project, led by Farzan, to bring a potential HIV vaccine closer to human clinical trials.

• share
• favorite_border

Although warm, spring weather means more time outdoors, it also means more bugs – like bees, ticks and mosquitoes. The best way to deal with pesky bites and stings, say dermatologists from the American Academy of Dermatology, is to prevent them in the first place. This can also help you avoid an insect-related disease, which can put a damper on anyone’s spring.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers from Harvard Medical School have discovered that the body’s immune system initially detects the presence of anthrax spores by recognizing RNA molecules that coat the spores’ surface. But this prompts an unfavorable immune response that hinders the body’s fight against anthrax once the spores have germinated into live bacteria, according to the study “TLR sensing of bacterial spore-associated RNA triggers host immune responses with detrimental effects,” which will be published April 11 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

Berkeley Lab researchers collaborated with colleagues from the University of Indiana and Texas A&M University to solve the atomic structure of a Zika virus protein that is key to viral reproduction. The X-ray studies were conducted at the Advanced Light Source in the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology.

• share
• favorite_border

The study, ”The Committed Inmate Relationships During Incarceration and STI/HIV Prevention,” aimed to characterize the relationships of incarcerated African-Americans and the influence of those characteristics in protection against STI/HIV risk when in the community, when STI/HIV transmission risk is greatest.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to tether HIV-fighting antibodies to immune cells, creating a cell population resistant to the virus.

• share
• favorite_border

Cholera cases in East Africa increase by roughly 50,000 during El Niño, the cyclical weather occurrence that profoundly changes global weather patterns, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

• share
• favorite_border

Ecologists at the University of Georgia have developed a model that maps the likelihood of Ebola virus “spillovers”—when the virus jumps from its long-term host to humans or animals such as great apes—across Africa on a month-by-month basis.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers in Germany have developed a transgenic mouse that could help scientists identify new influenza virus strains with the potential to cause a global pandemic. The mouse is described in a study, “In vivo evasion of MxA by avian influenza viruses requires human signature in the viral nucleoprotein,” that will be published April 10 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

• share
• favorite_border

The University of Chicago Medicine's Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation (Ci3) in Sexual and Reproductive Health has launched a research initiative aimed at reducing HIV infection and transmission among vulnerable youth of color, including young men who have sex with men (YMSM) and young transgender women.

• share
• favorite_border

Using computational tools inspired by financial math models developed to predict changes in stock prices, University of Iowa researchers were able to accurately predict how different properties of the HIV surface protein (Env) evolved in the population of Iowa over the course of 30 years. The ability to predict such changes by testing a small number of patients could potentially allow tailoring of vaccines to the specific forms of HIV present in different populations worldwide.

• share
• favorite_border

In patients with chronic kidney disease, low urine ammonium excretion identified individuals at high risk of kidney disease progression or death.