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Ambulance chasing is a discouraged practice in the U.S. – but in Liberia it’s exactly what Neil, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disease detective in the Center for Global Health, had to do as part of his efforts to stop the spread of Ebola at its source.

By all accounts, Ebola-the disease that has long struck fear in us as images of suffering in sub-Sahara Africa fill our TV screens and movies depict uncontrolled outbreaks-has now become a very real pandemic that is wiping out villages and rapidly crossing borders. As I write this article, the virus has killed nearly 5,000 people with thousands more infected. The United Nations estimates that it will need more than $1 billion to fight the epidemic and President Obama has already begun sending an estimated 4,000 U.S. military personnel and many more military medical staff to train the thousands of healthcare providers who will be needed to care for patients and prevent transmission of the disease.

Two approaches to infection prevention that are being used in hospitals today bear continued scrutiny as multidrug-resistant organisms proliferate, emphasize experts writing in a recent commentary in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. Edward Septimus, MD, of the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and of Hospital Corporation of America in Nashville, Tenn. and his co-authors urge clinicians to carefully consider the clinical advantages and cost-related disadvantages to each strategy.

The topic of antimicrobial stewardship is gaining momentum, both in and outside the healthcare field. Experts are looking at antimicrobial stewardship programs in hospitals and other care facilities as the next step in combatting the development of multidrug-resistant infections.

Noroviruses are pernicious intestinal viruses. They cause violent vomiting and diarrhea, and people ill with the virus remain contagious up to three days after they seem to recover. Although a vaccine for these viruses is in clinical trials, there is still no medication to combat them. That’s in part because researchers have not been able to culture human noroviruses so they can test potential treatments - until now, according to a study by University of Florida Health researchers published Friday, Nov. 7 in the journal Science.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has ordered $2.7 million in personal protective equipment (PPE) to increase Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) supplies to assist U.S. hospitals caring for Ebola patients. Products are being configured into 50 kits that can be rapidly delivered to hospitals. Each kit can provide the PPE needed by clinical teams to manage the care of one Ebola patient for up to five days.

Microbiologists and molecular biologists at ETH Zurich and the University of Bonn have discovered a new agent in fungi that kills bacteria. The substance, known as copsin, has the same effect as traditional antibiotics, but belongs to a different class of biochemical substances. Copsin is a protein, whereas traditional antibiotics are often non-protein organic compounds.