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Using 20,000 virus samples and weather statistics, researchers have now discovered more details about how outdoor temperature and flu outbreaks are linked.

In the future, it will be possible to carry out tests of new drugs on bacteria much more efficiently using microfluidic devices, since each of the hundreds and thousands of droplets moving through the microchannels can act as separate incubators. So far, however, there has been no quick or accurate method of assessing the oxygen conditions in individual microdroplets. This key obstacle has been overcome at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Mumps emerged among highly vaccinated populations in the Netherlands, and this offered a unique opportunity to study mumps virus transmission. In particular the extent to which asymptomatic infections in vaccinated people contribute to ongoing mumps virus transmission is uncertain. Hahné, et al. (2017) say insight into this could help project the future burden of mumps in vaccinated populations. They therefore studied the relative infectiousness of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases.

Researchers at Purdue University have determined the high-resolution structure of immature Zika virus, a step toward better understanding how the virus infects host cells and spreads.