In Uganda, taking a bath before surgery, closing the door to the operating theater and ensuring surgeons clean their hands properly can be the difference between life and death. A study involving more than 650 surgical patients, showed the rate of infections halved after new measures were introduced. As a result, patients are spending less time in hospital, resulting in cost-savings for both the patient and the hospital.
Aedes mosquitoes carrying the bacterium Wolbachia--found inside the cells of 60 percent of all insect species--are drastically less able to transmit Zika virus, say researchers at Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) in a study published May 4 in Cell Host & Microbe.
In a study prompted in part by suggestions from people with mental illness, Johns Hopkins researchers found that a history of Candida yeast infections was more common in a group of men with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder than in those without these disorders, and that women with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who tested positive for Candida performed worse on a standard memory test than women with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who had no evidence of past infection.
The University of Georgia's Mark Ebell wasn't impressed with research on infectious mononucleosis when he wrote his first published review on it back in the 1990s. He still isn't--a subject he discusses in the April issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Follicular helper T cells (Tfh cells), a rare type of T cells, are indispensable for the maturation of antibody-producing B cells. They promote the proliferation of B cells that produce highly selective antibodies against invading pathogens while weeding out those that generate potentially harmful ones. In their latest study, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology identified a key signal that drives the commitment of immature Tfh cells into fully functional Tfh cells and thus driving the step-by-step process that results in a precisely tailored and effective immune response.
When assigning blame for a number of outbreaks linked to contaminated and improperly processed duodenoscopes, a U.S. Senate report released in January pointed equally to hospitals, scope and equipment manufacturers and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for failing to act on known risks of infection. Duodenoscopes have been implicated in at least 250 patient infections with carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae (CRE) between 2012 and the spring of 2015.