News

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) investigators have developed two approaches to increasing the use of penicillins and cephalosporins - highly effective antibiotics that are not as problematic as many alternatives - in hospitalized patients previously believed to be allergic to penicillin. Their report, which has been published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, describes how both tested protocols -- use of penicillin allergy skin tests or a computerized guideline/decision support tool -- safely increased the use of penicillin and penicillin-related antibiotics in inpatients.

McMaster University researchers have found a new way to treat the world’s worst infectious diseases, the superbugs that are resistant to all known antibiotics. The discovery of an effective combination therapy has the potential to change medical practice for the treatment of the drug resistant infections which the World Health Organization (WHO) last week identified as of “critical priority” for their threat to human health. The research was published in the journal Nature Microbiology today.

In this new series for 2017, we offer insights from experts in industry and in healthcare delivery regarding smart evaluation and purchasing of infection prevention and control-related products. In this installment, we address IV and catheter-related products.

Healthcare technology that is poorly designed or implemented can contribute to patient harm, experts say, and health information technology (IT)-related patient safety events can go undetected.  As the adoption of healthcare IT becomes more widespread, clinicians must be on alert for increased risk of patient harm. One relationship that infection preventionists and other clinicians may not be cultivating as thoroughly as possible is with their healthcare institution's biomedical engineering and/or healthcare technology.

Chemists and molecular biologists have made an unexpected discovery in infection biology. The researchers can now show that two proteins that bind to one another slow down a chemical reaction central to the course of the disease in the bacteria Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The results have been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Researchers from the University of Leicester have for the first time discovered that bacteria that cause respiratory infections are directly affected by air pollution - increasing the potential for infection and changing the effectiveness of antibiotic treatment.

A new generation of vaccines for neglected tropical diseases is moving into clinical trials, and understanding the long-term stability and effectiveness of these vaccines over periods of storage is key to their success. Now, for the first time, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have developed a testing program to study the potency of a vaccine over years of storage.

Washington State University scientists are addressing growing global concern about the spread of antimicrobial resistance in Africa, where the World Health Organization predicts that, by 2050, drug resistant tuberculosis and other bacteria could lead to the deaths of 4.15 million people each year. Their work identifying practices that lead to bacterial transmission could help save African lives and prevent the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria to the U.S. and other parts of the globe.

Antibacterial compounds found in soil could spell the beginnings of a new treatment for tuberculosis, new research led by the University of Sydney has found. Believed by many to be a relic of past centuries, tuberculosis (TB) causes more deaths than any other infectious disease including HIV/AIDs. In 2015 there were an estimated 10.4 million new cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths from the disease.

After three rounds of competition - one of which involved a public vote - a software tool developed by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Basel to track Zika, Ebola and other viral disease outbreaks in real time has won the first-ever international Open Science Prize.

The Zika virus taking hold of the inner organelles of human liver and neural stem cells has been captured via light and electron microscopy. In Cell Reports on February 28, researchers in Germany show how the African and Asian strains of Zika rearrange the endoplasmic reticulum and cytoskeletal architecture of host cells so that they can build factories where they make daughter viruses. The study reveals that targeting cytoskeleton dynamics could be a previously unexplored strategy to suppress Zika replication.

Wolbachia is the most successful parasite the world has ever known. You’ve never heard of it because it only infects bugs: millions upon millions of species of insects, spiders, centipedes and other arthropods all around the globe.