News

A new Australian study shows that cells which form the bulk of our fast-acting 'innate' immune system behave differently, depending on whether an injury is infected or not. It is well known that paparazzi-like neutrophils swarm to sites of injury within minutes to undertake damage control and kill invaders. Most have very short lives and self-destruct once their job is done.

An international team, including archaeologists from the University of Southampton, has found evidence suggesting leprosy may have spread to Britain from Scandinavia. The team, led by the University of Leiden, and including researchers from Historic England and the universities of Southampton, Birmingham, Surrey, and Swansea, examined a 1500 year old male skeleton, excavated at Great Chesterford in Essex, England during the 1950s.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota has found a three-way link among antibiotic use in infants, changes in the gut bacteria, and disease later in life. The imbalances in gut microbes, called dysbiosis, have been tied to infectious diseases, allergies and other autoimmune disorders, and even obesity, later in life.

Researchers at the Institute of Food Research have established how clostridia bacteria emerge from spores. This could help them understand how these bacteria germinate and go on to produce the deadly toxin responsible for botulism, a lethal form of food poisoning, or cause food spoilage.

On May 9, 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reached a milestone, sending the 1,000th field deployer to West Africa as part of the largest outbreak response in the agency’s history.

In June 2014, Jim Strong and Allen Grolla, laboratory scientists from the Public Health Agency of Canada, were deployed through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) to work with WHO in Guinea and Sierra Leone. They had experience working in previous hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Angola, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya. As they began receiving and testing specimens they realized they were in the middle of something much bigger than any of the outbreaks they had seen before.

In recent years, bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) have been appearing more and more often in beds around the world, and entomologists need specimens for research purposes. Scientists in France have developed a tool that will aid this research, and their device is described in an article called "A High-Performance Vacuum Cleaner for Bed Bug Sampling: A Useful Tool for Medical Entomology" that was published in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Scientists at a U.S. Army research center have modified an assay that tests whether or not a sample of mosquitoes harbors the virus responsible for the disease known as chikungunya, long a problem in the Old World tropics but recently established in the Americas. Their assay is described in an article in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Identifying and tracking individuals affected by the Ebola virus in densely populated areas presents a unique and urgent set of challenges in public health surveillance. Currently, mapping the spread of the Ebola virus is done manually. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Grant (RAPID) to develop an innovative model of Ebola spread by using big data analytics techniques and tools.