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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics are well known - 1 in every 20 hospital patients acquires an infection while receiving medical care in hospitals. The CDC’s most recent estimates blame these healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) for nearly 100,000 deaths annually. 

An international research collaborative has determined that a promising anti-malarial compound tricks the immune system to rapidly destroy red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite but leave healthy cells unharmed. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists led the study, which appears in the current online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Penicillin, the wonder drug discovered in 1928, works in ways that are still mysterious almost a century later. One of the oldest and most widely used antibiotics, it attacks enzymes that build the bacterial cell wall, a mesh that surrounds the bacterial membrane and gives the cells their integrity and shape. Once that wall is breached, bacteria die - allowing us to recover from infection. That would be the end of the story, if resistance to penicillin and other antibiotics hadn’t emerged over recent decades as a serious threat to human health. While scientists continue to search for new antibiotics, they still don’t understand very much about how the old ones work. Now Thomas Bernhardt, associate professor of microbiology and immunobiology at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues have added another chapter to the story. Their findings, published Dec. 4 in Cell, reveal how penicillin deals bacteria a devastating blow - which may lead to new ways to thwart drug resistance.

The bacterium Salmonella Typhi causes typhoid fever in humans, but leaves other mammals unaffected. Researchers at University of California, San Diego and Yale University Schools of Medicine now offer one explanation - CMAH, an enzyme that humans lack. Without this enzyme, a toxin deployed by the bacteria is much better able to bind and enter human cells, making us sick. The study is published in the Dec. 4 issue of the journal Cell.

On Oct. 16, when a nurse from a Texas hospital took to the national media to decry unsafe conditions for workers exposed to the Ebola virus, the echoes carried all the way to Baltimore, to ethics professor Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN, and, she hopes, to the student nurses making their way toward tomorrow’s front lines.

Disease outbreaks and catastrophes can affect countries at any time, causing substantial human suffering and deaths and economic losses. If health systems are ill-equipped to deal with such situations, the affected populations can be very vulnerable.