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No one knows exactly how it happened. It may have entered through a cut or bite wound, the blood of a chimpanzee seeping into an exposed fingertip or forearm or foot. But in the early 1900s, probably near a West African rainforest, it's thought that a hunter or vendor of bush meat -- wild game that can include primates -- acquired the first strain of a simian immunodeficiency virus that virologists consider the ancestor of HIV.

Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified a new way that tuberculosis bacteria get into the body, revealing a potential therapeutic angle to explore. One of the world's most deadly diseases, tuberculosis infects more than 8 million people and is responsible for 1.5 million deaths each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately one-third of the world's population is infected with tuberculosis. The bacterium that causes tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or Mtb, previously was thought to infect the body only through inhalation and subsequent infection of cells in the lungs.

Dr. Lars Eisen and Marc Dolan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have reviewed decades of scientific literature on the effectiveness of various methods of preventing bites and controlling ticks that transmit Lyme disease. Their findings are published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Disease ecologists working in the Amazonian city of Iquitos, Peru, have quantified for the first time how a fever affects human mobility during the outbreak of a mosquito-borne pathogen. The findings were published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Patients suffering from liver cirrhosis often die of life-threatening bacterial infections. In these patients the immune cells are unable to eliminate the bacterial infections. Scientist at the University of Bonn and TU Munich have now discovered that type I IFN released by immune cells due to increased migration of gut bacteria into the cirrhotic liver incapacitate the immune system. Based on their findings, such life-threatening infections can be contained by strengthening the immune response alone -- without antibiotics. The results have now appeared in the journal Gut.