News

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.