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Imagine a submicroscopic packet of proteins arranged symmetrically to enclose an inner genome -- and you have a virus. Viruses are so miniscule in size that most require electron microscopy to see them clearly, and more than 3,000 polio virus particles could fit end-to-end in a straight line across the period at the end of this sentence.  Now, that’s small! Yet, many viruses wreak havoc on vastly larger and more complex organisms.

Ian Norton is an emergency physician who came to West Africa in 2014 to help find and coordinate foreign medical teams to treat people with Ebola virus disease. Under Norton’s guidance, WHO developed a registry of foreign medical teams around the world able to respond rapidly not only to Ebola but to other health emergencies.

Robots are capable of all sorts of tasks to help better treat cancer: They connect oncologists to patients remotely, make incisions, staple them shut, deliver "nano" therapies--and they clean rooms. New research from Penn Medicine infection control specialists found that ultraviolet (UV) robots helped reduce the rates transmission of the common bacterial infection known as Clostridium difficile among cancer inpatients - mostly blood cancer patients, a group more vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections - by 25 percent. The interventions also saved about $150,000 in annual direct medical costs.

aureus (MRSA) that loiter on surfaces even after patient rooms have been cleaned and can cause new, sometimes-deadly infections. But a new study from Duke Medicine has found that using a combination of chemicals and UV light to clean patient rooms cut transmission of four major superbugs by a cumulative 30 percent among a specific group of patients -- those who stay overnight in a room where someone with a known positive culture or infection of a drug-resistant organism had previously been treated.