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In Uganda, taking a bath before surgery, closing the door to the operating theater and ensuring surgeons clean their hands properly can be the difference between life and death. A study involving more than 650 surgical patients, showed the rate of infections halved after new measures were introduced. As a result, patients are spending less time in hospital, resulting in cost-savings for both the patient and the hospital.

Aedes mosquitoes carrying the bacterium Wolbachia--found inside the cells of 60 percent of all insect species--are drastically less able to transmit Zika virus, say researchers at Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) in a study published May 4 in Cell Host & Microbe.

In a study prompted in part by suggestions from people with mental illness, Johns Hopkins researchers found that a history of Candida yeast infections was more common in a group of men with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder than in those without these disorders, and that women with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who tested positive for Candida performed worse on a standard memory test than women with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who had no evidence of past infection.

The University of Georgia's Mark Ebell wasn't impressed with research on infectious mononucleosis when he wrote his first published review on it back in the 1990s. He still isn't--a subject he discusses in the April issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.