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For much of her adult life Valerie Sim has been fascinated by a disease very few in the world can claim to even begin to understand. Sim is one of Canada's foremost authorities on prion disease--more commonly known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease in cattle, or Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease among humans. In both cases there is no cure; nor are there treatments available. But Sim's latest research is providing new hope for the future.

Today, Sept. 3, 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared Liberia to be free of Ebola virus transmission in the human population. Forty-two days have passed since the second negative test on July 22, 2015 of the last laboratory-confirmed case. Liberia now enters a 90-day period of heightened surveillance.

Bacteria’s ability to become resistant to antibiotics is a growing issue in health care: Resistant strains result in prolonged illnesses and higher mortality rates. One way to combat this is to determine bacteria’s antibiotic resistance in a given patient, but that often takes days - and time is crucial in treatment. Arizona State University (ASU) scientists have developed a technique that can sort antibiotic-resistant from “susceptible” bacteria, and it happens in a matter of minutes.

An international research team, headed by Joseph Vinetz, MD, professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and director of the UC San Diego Center for Tropical Medicine and Travelers Health, has been awarded a five-year, $1.89 million cooperative agreement to carry out translational research studies of leptospirosis, an infectious and sometimes fatal bacterial disease endemic in much of the world.

Detection of a new case of Ebola virus disease in Kambia, Sierra Leone after the country had marked almost three weeks of zero cases has set in motion the first "ring vaccination" use of the experimental Ebola vaccine in Sierra Leone.

Modern infection control, which is based on the scientific work of 19th century scientists such as Pasteur, Lister and Koch, was organized as a specialty for non-physician practitioners almost a century later. Hospital based infection control emerged as a distinct specialty in the 1970s. In its early decades the evolving specialty arena was led by registered nurses who still remain the single largest group of clinicians within what has now become a multidisciplinary field.