New Type of Monitoring Provides Information About the Life of Bacteria in Microdroplets
January 11th 2017In 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.
Researchers Study Mumps Transmission in Social Networks
January 10th 2017Mumps 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.
2017 Outlook: Basics of Infection Prevention, Advances in Antimicrobial Stewardship are Priorities
January 6th 20172017 promises to present a number of continuing and new challenges for the infection prevention and healthcare epidemiology community. One of the most significant for the field as well as the entire country is a new Presidential Administration. Sara Cosgrove, MD, MS, FSHEA, FIDSA, associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2017 president of the Society of Healthcare Epidemiologists of America (SHEA), acknowledges what she characterizes as "an enormous amount of uncertainty" about how a revamped White House and Congress could impact infection prevention and antibiotic stewardship-related issues.
Research Describes How Bacteria Resists Last-Resort Antibiotic
January 6th 2017An international research team, led by the University of Bristol, has provided the first clues to understand how the mcr-1 gene protects bacteria from colistin, a last-resort antibiotic used to treat life-threatening bacterial infections that do not respond to other treatment options.