News

Bars and street corners are ideal venues for broad dissemination of HIV prevention information among drug-using male sex workers and other at-risk populations, according to researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The research was published last week in the American Journal of Public Health.

As the current Ebola outbreak wanes, scientists have to make the most of every opportunity to prepare for future outbreaks. One such opportunity involves the identification of a safe and effective Ebola vaccine. Texas supercomputers have aided researchers in modelling which types of clinical trials will provide the best information. That's according to University of Texas at Austin researchers Steve Bellan and Lauren Meyers, who are studying Ebola vaccine trials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Aminata Kobie is a health promotion officer in WHO's Sierra Leone Country Office. When the first Ebola cases began to appear in May 2014 in Sierra Leone, Kobie traveled the country educating health workers and communities about the virus. As the outbreak spread throughout the country, Kobie spent months at a time educating her fellow Sierra Leoneans and visiting resistant communities where Ebola cases continued to occur.

Research teams led by Edward Yu of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory have described the structures of two proteins they believe pump antibiotics from bacteria, allowing the bacteria to resist medications. One of the protein pumps, known as MtrF, is believed to be the mechanism that allows gonorrhea bacteria to resist certain antibiotics.