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In 2012, the World Health Organization set two public health goals for Gambian sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease spread by the tsetse fly. The first is to eliminate the disease as a public health problem and have fewer than 2000 cases by 2020. And the second goal is to achieve zero transmission around the globe by 2030. Now, by mathematically modeling the impact of different intervention strategies, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have described how two-pronged approaches, integrating medical intervention and vector control, could substantially speed up the elimination of sleeping sickness in high burden areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

In 2016, Zika virus spread rapidly throughout the Americas after its initial appearance in Brazil in May 2015. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) responded quickly, deploying over 80 expert missions to help its member states respond to the epidemic and launching a new regional strategy to prevent and control mosquito-borne viruses, which threaten an estimated 500 million at-risk people in the region.

A chance meeting between a spider expert and a chemist has led to the development of antibiotic synthetic spider silk. After five years' work an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Nottingham has developed a technique to produce chemically functionalized spider silk that can be tailored to applications used in drug delivery, regenerative medicine and wound healing.

Scientists at the University of York have harnessed the therapeutic effects of carbon monoxide-releasing molecules to develop a new antibiotic which could be used to treat the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea.

The quest to understand a prolonged infection in an infant being treated for leukemia has led to the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital discovery of a mutation that allows bacteria to tolerate normally effective antibiotic therapy. The report appears today in the scientific journal mBio.

Mosquitoes kill an estimated 700 000 people a year. If infected with viruses that cause diseases like chikungunya, dengue and Zika, mosquitos can transmit them to humans in one bite. Researchers have now pilot-deployed a new technique to control diseases transmitted by mosquitoes by making use of nature. It is one of the new tools WHO recommends for pilot deployment as a response to Zika virus.