News

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have received a $7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at eliminating river blindness and elephantiasis, two neglected tropical diseases that annually sicken millions.

In equatorial Africa, a region of the globe known as the “lymphoma belt,” children are 10 times more likely than in other parts of the world to develop Burkitt’s lymphoma, a highly aggressive blood cancer that can be fatal if left untreated. That area is also plagued by high rates of malaria, and scientists have spent the last 50 years trying to understand how the two diseases are connected.

An international team of researchers has developed the largest genomic data set in the world on Lassa virus (LASV). The new genomic catalog contains nearly 200 viral genomes collected from patient samples in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as field samples from the major animal reservoir, or host, of Lassa virus--the rodent Mastomys natalensis, also called the multimammate rat. The researchers show that LASV strains cluster into four major groups based on geographic location, with three in Nigeria and one in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Although Lassa fever was first described in modern-day Nigeria in 1969, the current study also suggests that these four LASV strains originated from a common ancestral virus more than 1,000 years ago and spread across West Africa within the last several hundred years.

In the Horn of Africa, no wild polio cases have been reported since the last case in central Somalia on Aug. 11, 2014. Although it is not yet an official milestone on the path to polio-free certification, today marks one year since the last wild polio case was detected on the entire African continent, signaling important progress toward eradication.

Advances in the field of statistics are helping to unlock the mysteries of the human microbiome--the vast collection of microorganisms living in and on the bodies of humans, says Katherine Pollard, a statistician and biome expert, during a session today at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle.

Urinary tract infections can quickly move from being a merely miserable experience to a life-threatening condition. Untreated cases may trigger sepsis, which occurs when the immune system, in an attempt to fight off the infection, inadvertently activates body-wide inflammation that can cause blood clots and leaky blood vessels.

Using molecular modeling and large-scale molecular dynamic simulation, University of Illinois researchers constructed an atomic model of an immature retrovirus. The researchers, from the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois, published their work in the journal Structure.

Back to school is an annual reminder to make sure children are fully vaccinated. But vaccination is a life-long health concern and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) urges adults to use the seasonal cue to ensure their own immunizations are up to date.