News

Before the infamous Black Death, the first great plague epidemic was the Justinian plague, which, over the course of two centuries, wiped out up to an estimated 50 million (15 percent) of the world's population throughout the Byzantine Empire----and may have helped speed the decline of the eastern Roman Empire. No one knows why it disappeared.

In a study of children with brain shunts at Children's of Alabama, a University of Alabama at Birmingham investigational biomarker outperformed the current "gold standard" test for detecting bacterial infections in the shunts.

Every year, millions of people are treated for cystitis, but despite its prevalence, the disease is still a scientific mystery. Now a research team from University of Southern Denmark has succeeded in identifying how the bacteria responsible for the disease cause the disease to develop. This is a cause for optimism that more effective treatment methods can be developed.

As researchers gain increasing experience with UV-C light, they are reporting encouraging results related to efficacy against some of the most problematic pathogens in hospitals today.

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death worldwide among people infected with HIV. But as yet, no test can reliably show when latent TB infections in people with HIV starts progressing to active-and potentially fatal-TB disease. Now, a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a five-year, $3.7 million National Institutes of Health grant to identify biomarkers that signal an increase in activity by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the bacterium that causes TB, in people with HIV.

Scientists report that a specialized drug screen test using lab-grown human cells has revealed two classes of compounds already in the pharmaceutical arsenal that may work against mosquito-borne Zika virus infections. In a summary of their work, published in Nature Medicine on Aug. 29, the investigators say they screened 6,000 existing compounds currently in late-stage clinical trials or already approved for human use for other conditions, and identified several compounds that showed the ability to hinder or halt the progress of the Zika virus in lab-grown human neural cells.

People with blood type O often get more severely ill from cholera than people of other blood types. New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may explain why.

Penicilliosis, caused by the fungus Talaromyces marneffei, is a major opportunistic infection in Southeast Asia. A study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases reports that the fungal protein Mp1p is responsible for the pathogen's ability to cause disease in mice, and that it does so by allowing survival of the fungus in macrophages.

A couple of years ago, there was a report in the news that during 2008 and 2009 five children died at a Louisiana children’s hospital from an infection passed to them through their hospital linens. To follow up on this tragedy, a reporter wanted to know if there had been any changes made in how the hospital laundered its linens. The reporter posed this question to the hospital’s associate medical director of patient safety and quality. According to her account, the reporter asked the medical director who was the hospital’s current launderer. First, the medical director responded that he didn’t think it was pertinent, and then he said he didn’t know. And he said he didn’t know a second time when asked the same question at a subsequent news conference. Keep in mind: This is the hospital’s director of patient safety and quality.