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Sepsis accounts for considerably more hospital readmissions and associated costs than any of the four medical conditions tracked by the federal government to measure quality of care and guide pay-for-performance reimbursements, according to an analysis led by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System.

Over the last few years, a growing number of serious infections have been linked to bacteria forming in heater-cooler devices (HCDs) used in cardiac surgery operating rooms. In these cases, aerosolized bacteria, predominantly nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) from the HCDs, contaminated the operative field. Emerging evidence regarding the incidence and challenges of detecting the infections has triggered alarms at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and regulatory agencies in Europe.

Scientists have discovered how a unique bacterial enzyme can blunt the body's key weapons in its fight against infection. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Newcastle University in the U.K. are investigating how infectious microbes can survive attacks by the body's immune system. By better understanding the bacteria's defenses, new strategies can be developed to cure infections that are currently resistant to treatments, the researchers said.

How big you are may be as important as what you look like, at least to immune system cells watching for dangerous bacteria and viruses. The size of pathogenic particles and the density of the molecular information stored on them provides additional danger signals to the body's immune system and helps guide the resulting immune response, suggests cellular and animal research published this week in the journal Cell Reports. Understanding these biophysical cues may help vaccine developers fine tune the signals they already knew were being transmitted by the molecular information presented to the immune system.