News

Evidence-based practice is being implemented through a variety of patient-safety tools, but perhaps checklists and bundles remain one of the best ways to drive down infection rates and boost compliance among healthcare personnel that leads to better patient outcomes. Atul Gawande, MD, in his book The Checklist Manifesto, analyzes the positive impact of checklists in healthcare and in other industries, to handle “the volume and complexity of what we know.” As Gawande (2010) explains, "Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result so has our struggle to deliver on them … Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields-from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us."

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), in collaboration with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, has completed a second round of preclinical studies on a promising Zika vaccine candidate and found it to completely protect rhesus monkeys from experimental infection with Zika virus.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched a clinical trial of a vaccine candidate intended to prevent Zika virus infection. The early-stage study will evaluate the experimental vaccine’s safety and ability to generate an immune system response in participants. At least 80 healthy volunteers ages 18-35 years at three study sites in the United States, including the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, are expected to participate in the trial. Scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) developed the investigational vaccine - called the NIAID Zika virus investigational DNA vaccine - earlier this year.

Since the start of the HIV epidemic, there have been speculations as to why HIV and the immunodeficiency syndrome it causes have spread so much more in Africa than in other countries around the world. Scientists from the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have now, for the first time, confirmed one reason for this: in a cohort study conducted in Tanzania, they discovered that an infection with the filarial nematode Wuchereria bancrofti increases the risk of HIV infection by two- to three-fold. The study has recently been published in The Lancet.

More than 36 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the U.S., are living with an HIV infection. Today's anti-retroviral cocktails block how HIV replicates, matures and gets into uninfected cells, but they can't eradicate the virus. Mike Kent, a researcher in Sandia National Laboratories' Biological and Engineering Sciences Center, is studying a protein called Nef involved in HIV progression to AIDS with the ultimate goal of blocking it. He and his collaborators have developed a new hybrid method to study this HIV protein that compromises the immune system. The method also could work on many other proteins that damage cellular processes and cause diseases.

Escherichia coli K1 (E. coli K1) continues to be a major threat to the health of young infants. Affecting the central nervous system, it causes neonatal meningitis by multiplying in immune cells, such as macrophages, and then disseminating into the bloodstream to subsequently invade the blood-brain barrier. Neonatal and childhood meningitis in particular results in long-term neurological problems such as seizures or ADHD in up to half of the survivors.

Scientists studying how microbes evolve have long assumed that nearly all new genetic mutations get passed down at a predictable pace and usually without either helping or hurting the microbe in adapting to its environment. In a new study published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers studying tens of thousands of generations of E. coli bacteria report that most new genetic mutations that were passed down were actually beneficial and occurred at much more variable rates than previously thought. The finding could have implications for treating bacterial infections.

With the report from Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Monday that 14 people in the state have been infected with the Zika virus most likely through mosquito transmission, the concern about out­breaks in the U.S. has intensified. The news comes on the heels of new research by Northeastern pro­fessor Alessandro Vespig­nani that can help coun­tries in the Americas plan a response.

Adjuvants -- ingredients added to vaccinations for influenza and other viruses to help boost their effectiveness -- can increase a host's immune response but not enough to protect the obese against the ill effects of the flu, according to a mouse study published this week in mBio®, an online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

New research indicates that brief heat treatment is a promising way to decrease the spread of bed bugs being transported on the outer surface of luggage. When soft-sided suitcases with male bed bugs on the outside were exposed to an air temperature of 70 degrees to 75 degrees C, it took only six minutes to kill all of the bed bugs, even those that had concealed themselves under zipper flaps or decorative piping. During heating, only one bed bug (out of 250 total) moved into the luggage (through a closed zipper). Also, at room temperature, only three percent of bugs placed on the outside of the suitcases had moved inside during a 24-hour period.