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Warring armies use a variety of tactics as they struggle to gain the upper hand. Among their tricks is to attack with a decoy force that occupies the defenders while an unseen force launches a separate attack that the defenders fail to notice. A study published earlier this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the hepatitis C virus (HCV) may employ similar tactics to distract the body's natural defenses. After infecting patients, hepatitis C evolves many variants, among them an "altruistic" group of viral particles that appears to sacrifice itself to protect other mutants from the body's immune system.

Barbara Bono began working at Elwa hospital in Monrovia, Liberia just as word began to spread about Ebola. Although staff did their best to learn about the new disease and how to protect themselves, reality was very different from the theory. One by one staff fell sick but Bono continued to come to work, until she, too was infected with Ebola while caring for a man who denied his symptoms for fear of being sent to an Ebola treatment unit.

Before the Ebola virus arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, hospital nurse Adiatu Pujeh and her colleagues at the King Harman Hospital thought malaria was the most challenging disease they faced. But Ebola, which arrived in their midst last September, infecting Pujeh and killing many of her colleagues, changed all that.

Mohamed Sesay was once part of an eight-person team of laboratory technicians trained to test for Ebola virus. But as the outbreak exploded and more and more samples arrived, his team was overwhelmed. One by one his colleagues sickened and died. He too eventually fell ill but survived, and is the only member of his team left to tell the tale.

Tests for antibiotic resistance can take up to three days to come back from the lab, hindering doctors' ability to treat bacterial infections quickly. Now, researcher Justin Besant and his team at the University of Toronto have designed a small and simple chip to test for antibiotic resistance in just one hour, giving doctors a shot at picking the most effective antibiotic to treat potentially deadly infections. Their work was published this week in the international journal Lab on a Chip

By unlocking the secrets of a bizarre virus that survives in nearly boiling acid, scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have found a blueprint for battling human disease using DNA clad in near-indestructible armor.

A recent study with Kansas State University researchers details vaccine development for two new strains of avian influenza that can be transmitted from poultry to humans. The strains have led to the culling of millions of commercial chickens and turkeys as well as the death of hundreds of people.

With Canadian government funding, medical scientists have created and demonstrated a new tool that could dramatically lower the tragic annual toll of 760,000 infants and children killed, and millions more stunted, due to severe diarrhea. Using an inexpensive innovation in specimen collection, the Canadian-led team diagnosed previously unrecognized pathogens that had caused the severe diarrhea of more than one-third of children in a group of southern Africa hospitals.

The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) and Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) Canada annual conferences are just around the corner. Industry leaders will come together to exchange knowledge and creative solutions toward our shared goal of reducing hospital-acquired infections (HAI) and associated costs – financial and beyond. Many types of technology and solutions will be presented to enhance every aspect of the infection preventionist role, including hand hygiene compliance monitoring.

Researchers with the Fralin Life Science Institute at Virginia Tech have identified a gene responsible for sex determination in mosquitoes that can transmit yellow fever, dengue, and chikungunya viruses. Only female mosquitoes bite because they need blood for developing eggs, and researchers believe that a higher ratio of males could reduce disease transmission.