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Immune Factor Allows Viral Infections to Become Chronic

Many viral diseases tend to become chronic - including infections with the HI virus. In persons affected, the immune response is not sufficient to eliminate the virus permanently. Scientists at the University of Bonn have now identified an immune factor which is partially responsible for this. Their results give rise to hopes for new therapeutic approaches. The work, which included researchers from the University of Cologne and the Technical University of Munich, is being published in the journal Nature Immunology.

Urinary Tract Infection: How Bacteria Nestle In

Almost every second woman suffers from a bladder infection at some point in her life. Also men are affected by cystitis, though less frequently. In eighty percent of the cases, it is caused by the intestinal bacterium E. coli. It travels along the urethra to the bladder where it triggers painful infections. In "Nature Communications" researchers from the University of Basel and the ETH Zurich explain how this bacterium attaches to the surface of the urinary tract via a protein with a sophisticated locking technique, which prevents it from being flushed out by the urine flow.

App Helps Health Departments Track Foodborne Illnesses

Foodborne illness afflicts 48 million people annually in the U.S. alone; 120,000 individuals are hospitalized annually, and 3,000 die from the illness. In fact, one out of every six Americans gets food poisoning each year. And many of these sufferers write about it on Twitter. Computer science researchers from the University of Rochester have developed an app for health departments that uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to identify food poisoning-related tweets, connect them to restaurants using geotagging and identify likely hot spots.

Study Offers Clearest Picture Yet of How HIV Defeats a Cellular Defender

A new study offers the first atomic-scale view of an interaction between the HIV capsid - the protein coat that shepherds HIV into the nucleus of human cells - and a host protein known as cyclophilin A. This interaction is key to HIV infection, researchers say. A paper describing the research appears in the journal Nature Communications.