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Viruses that attack bacteria -- bacteriophages -- can be fussy: they only inject their genetic material into the bacteria that suit them. The fussiness of bacteriophages can be exploited in order to detect specific species of bacteria. Scientists from Warsaw have just demonstrated that bacteriophage-based biosensors will be much more efficient if prior to the deposition on the surface of the bacteriophage sensor their orientation is ordered in electric field.

When you get cold sores, the reason is likely related to stress. In particular, the neurons in which the herpes simplex virus (HSV) reside, are under stress. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine discovered a cellular mechanism that allows the virus to reactivate. They also found how brain cells are duped into allowing bits of virus to escape the very repressive environment in neurons and cause disease.

Within weeks, flu will start spreading across North America, sickening millions of people. It will hit people with health problems and weak immune systems hardest, and may kill tens of thousands of them. Multiple national recommendations urge all healthcare workers to get the influenza vaccination, to reduce the chances they will pass the virus on to their patients. But a new study finds that more than half of hospitals still don't require their doctors, nurses and other health care providers to get vaccinated against the flu -- despite the fact that they're in contact with the people most vulnerable to flu every day.

An innovative inpatient care model utilizing multidisciplinary accountable care teams reduced hospital stays and lowered costs even beyond those associated with fewer days of hospitalization, according to a new study published in the December issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The Accountable Care Teams model, ACT model for short, is based on three foundational domains: enhancing interpersonal collaboration between healthcare team members, enabling data-driven decisions, and providing leadership.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have worked with Coventry-based Medherant, a Warwick spinout company, to produce and patent the world’s first ibuprofen patch delivering the drug directly through skin to exactly where it is needed at a consistent dose rate.

By following a DNA trail through the secretive world of heroin use, researchers may have shown the way for public health officials to solve infectious disease problems affecting the wider population. Led by Paul Keim, Regents’ Professor and Cowden Endowed Chair of Microbiology at Northern Arizona University, a collaborative team of international scientists shone new light on an old question about injectional anthrax by demonstrating the latest advances in whole genome sequencing. Researchers from Germany, England and the United States reconstructed a decades-old outbreak of injectional anthrax by DNA analysis of the anthrax conveyed to victims from injecting heroin.

In the early hours of Oct. 3, 2015, rockets slammed into a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 14 health workers and injuring 37. An MSF clinic in the southern Yemen city of Taiz was bombed on Dec. 2, 2015, injuring nine people, including two MSF staff. Since 2012, almost 60 percent of hospitals in Syria have been partially or completely destroyed, and more than half of the country’s health workers have fled or been killed.

With a new $1,780,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Saint Louis University researchers aim to develop a biomarker that will buy precious time for sepsis patients.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Stony Brook University and the Institute of Advanced Sciences in Dartmouth, Mass., have discovered new details about how "cloaking" proteins protect the toxin that causes botulism, a fatal disease caused most commonly by consuming improperly canned foods. That knowledge and the cloaking proteins themselves might now be turned against the toxin-the deadliest known to humankind-to deliver vaccines or drugs that could prevent or treat the disease. The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports, published online Dec. 7, 2015.