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Ebola Diaries: Detecting Disease on an Unprecedented Scale

In June 2014, Jim Strong and Allen Grolla, laboratory scientists from the Public Health Agency of Canada, were deployed through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) to work with WHO in Guinea and Sierra Leone. They had experience working in previous hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Angola, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya. As they began receiving and testing specimens they realized they were in the middle of something much bigger than any of the outbreaks they had seen before.

French Researchers Develop New Device to Collect Bed Bugs

In recent years, bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) have been appearing more and more often in beds around the world, and entomologists need specimens for research purposes. Scientists in France have developed a tool that will aid this research, and their device is described in an article called "A High-Performance Vacuum Cleaner for Bed Bug Sampling: A Useful Tool for Medical Entomology" that was published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

New Device Provides Chikungunya Test Results in an Hour

Scientists at a U.S. Army research center have modified an assay that tests whether or not a sample of mosquitoes harbors the virus responsible for the disease known as chikungunya, long a problem in the Old World tropics but recently established in the Americas. Their assay is described in an article in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Program Uses Social Media to Develop Computer Model for Ebola Spread

Identifying and tracking individuals affected by the Ebola virus in densely populated areas presents a unique and urgent set of challenges in public health surveillance. Currently, mapping the spread of the Ebola virus is done manually. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Grant (RAPID) to develop an innovative model of Ebola spread by using big data analytics techniques and tools.

Potential Mechanism to Combat Hemorrhagic Fever Viruses is Identified

A potential mechanism to combat diseases caused by hemorrhagic fever viruses has been discovered by researchers at the University of Montreal's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine. These diseases present a dramatic risk to human health as they often spread quickly and kill a high percentage of infected individuals, as demonstrated by the recent Ebola outbreaks. Effective treatments such as vaccines and drug therapies are not available for many of these infections since the outbreaks mostly occur in developing countries with limited financial resources. Moreover, the genomes of many haemorrhagic fever viruses mutate rapidly, enabling them to quickly adapt to potential drug treatments and evade the immune system.