The “resistance movement” founded by bacteria to combat antibiotics may be losing ground. By combining key properties of two different types of weapons used by the innate defense systems of organisms, a team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science has managed to design a more powerful weapon, hoping that this will provide a basis for novel and more effective antibiotics.
Medical teams — not individuals — are critical to the prevention of catheter-related bloodstream infections, as well as for the overall health, safety, and welfare of patients, according to an editorial by two Virginia Commonwealth University physicians published in today’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
A 26-year-old Egyptian man died of bird flu on Wednesday, the third member of his extended family to die of the virus, a World Health Organisation (WHO) report highlighted.
Hospitals will quickly slash the rate of common, costly and potentially lethal catheter-related bloodstream infections in their intensive care units (ICUs) by using cheap, low-tech, common-sense measures like hand washing, timely removal of unneeded catheters and use of sites other than the groin to place lines when possible, according to a report from safety experts at Johns Hopkins in the Dec. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Kasturi Haldar and colleagues from Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, investigated a protein in red blood cells (erythrocyte guanine nucleotide regulatory protein Gs) as a novel antimalarial target.
Latent infection with tuberculosis is common and some infected people develop the active form of the disease. Health-care workers (HCWs) can become infected, develop active disease, and can pass their infection on to patients and others. Research published in PLoS Medicine shows that HCWs in developing countries are at particularly high risk. Over half were found to have latent TB.
A team of researchers who conducted a landmark trial in Orange Farm, South Africa, which concluded that male circumcision can substantially reduce the risk of becoming infected with HIV, have now studied the economic aspects of this approach to preventing HIV/AIDS. Their new research, published in PLoS Medicine, suggests that circumcision could reduce the cost of health care in South Africa (and other sub-Saharan Countries), mainly through savings on the cost of HIV treatment.
Much like flipping a light switch, the hepatitis C virus turns on human immune defenses upon entering the body but also turns off those defenses by manipulating interaction of key cellular proteins, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.
New studies on nutrition and HIV from researchers at Tufts University in Boston find that a high percentage of people with HIV have the same two characteristics of metabolic syndrome, and that people with HIV on HAART may be at risk for zinc deficiency.
IRD immuno-virologists and their research partners have determined the mechanisms involved in the occurrence of the vascular leakage triggered by the Dengue virus. Metalloproteinases are responsible for the passage of plasma across the blood-vessel walls. These original results, validated first by in vitro tests then in vivo on a mouse model, open up the first line of attack for treatment against hemorrhagic Dengue and new perspectives for others hemorrhagic fevers, such as Ebola.