News

“Take away the fear, don’t hide yourself. People can still survive from Ebola,” so say the lyrics of the Ebola Rap, a song written by Charles Yegba, a Liberian artist seeking to raise awareness about the virus in his community.

In many parts of the world, leprosy and tuberculosis live side-by-side. Worldwide there are approximately 233,000 new cases of leprosy per year, with nearly all of them occurring where tuberculosis is endemic. The currently available century-old vaccine Bacille Calmette-Guerin, or BCG, provides only partial protection against both tuberculosis and leprosy, so a more potent vaccine is needed to combat both diseases. UCLA-led research may have found a stronger weapon against both diseases.

Although HIV can now be effectively suppressed using anti-retroviral drugs, it still comes surging back the moment the flow of drugs is stopped. Latent reservoirs of HIV-infected cells, invisible to the body’s immune system and unreachable by pharmaceuticals, ensure that the infection will rebound after therapy is terminated. But a new strategy devised by researchers at Rockefeller University harnesses the power of broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV, along with a combination of compounds that induce viral transcription, in order to attack these latent reservoirs of cells in an approach termed “shock and kill.” In tests on mice, 57 percent of animals treated in this way did not have the expected resurgence of virus in their blood after their treatment ended.