News

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched a clinical trial of a vaccine candidate intended to prevent Zika virus infection. The early-stage study will evaluate the experimental vaccine’s safety and ability to generate an immune system response in participants. At least 80 healthy volunteers ages 18-35 years at three study sites in the United States, including the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, are expected to participate in the trial. Scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) developed the investigational vaccine - called the NIAID Zika virus investigational DNA vaccine - earlier this year.

Since the start of the HIV epidemic, there have been speculations as to why HIV and the immunodeficiency syndrome it causes have spread so much more in Africa than in other countries around the world. Scientists from the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have now, for the first time, confirmed one reason for this: in a cohort study conducted in Tanzania, they discovered that an infection with the filarial nematode Wuchereria bancrofti increases the risk of HIV infection by two- to three-fold. The study has recently been published in The Lancet.

More than 36 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the U.S., are living with an HIV infection. Today's anti-retroviral cocktails block how HIV replicates, matures and gets into uninfected cells, but they can't eradicate the virus. Mike Kent, a researcher in Sandia National Laboratories' Biological and Engineering Sciences Center, is studying a protein called Nef involved in HIV progression to AIDS with the ultimate goal of blocking it. He and his collaborators have developed a new hybrid method to study this HIV protein that compromises the immune system. The method also could work on many other proteins that damage cellular processes and cause diseases.

Escherichia coli K1 (E. coli K1) continues to be a major threat to the health of young infants. Affecting the central nervous system, it causes neonatal meningitis by multiplying in immune cells, such as macrophages, and then disseminating into the bloodstream to subsequently invade the blood-brain barrier. Neonatal and childhood meningitis in particular results in long-term neurological problems such as seizures or ADHD in up to half of the survivors.

With the report from Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Monday that 14 people in the state have been infected with the Zika virus most likely through mosquito transmission, the concern about out­breaks in the U.S. has intensified. The news comes on the heels of new research by Northeastern pro­fessor Alessandro Vespig­nani that can help coun­tries in the Americas plan a response.

Adjuvants -- ingredients added to vaccinations for influenza and other viruses to help boost their effectiveness -- can increase a host's immune response but not enough to protect the obese against the ill effects of the flu, according to a mouse study published this week in mBio®, an online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

New research indicates that brief heat treatment is a promising way to decrease the spread of bed bugs being transported on the outer surface of luggage. When soft-sided suitcases with male bed bugs on the outside were exposed to an air temperature of 70 degrees to 75 degrees C, it took only six minutes to kill all of the bed bugs, even those that had concealed themselves under zipper flaps or decorative piping. During heating, only one bed bug (out of 250 total) moved into the luggage (through a closed zipper). Also, at room temperature, only three percent of bugs placed on the outside of the suitcases had moved inside during a 24-hour period.

Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes. The disease is difficult to diagnose because it has similar symptoms as a range of other diseases, such as malaria and dengue. With more than 5,000 suspected yellow fever cases and more than 400 deaths reported in Angola and Democratic Republic of the Congo, getting an accurate diagnosis is critical to saving lives and ending the outbreak.

A new, epidemic strain of C. difficile is proving alarmingly deadly, and new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine not only explains why but also suggests a way to stop it. Until now, scientists have not understood what made this strain worse than other strains of the bacteria, the most common cause of hospital-acquired infections. The new strain kills up to 15 percent of infected patients, including those who receive antibiotics, and has become increasingly common over the last 15 years. This has prompted the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to label it an "urgent threat."