News

Researchers explore individuals' confidence or reluctance to vaccinate their families and the associated effects on global health, in a collection published on Feb. 25 by the open-access journal, PLOS Currents: Outbreaks. The collection is accompanied by the editorial "Hesitancy, trust and individualism in vaccination decision-making" by Jonathan E. Suk et al. from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

The Georgia Institute of Technology and Micron Biomedical have been awarded $2.5 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance the development of dissolvable microneedle patches for polio immunization. The patches will be studied to evaluate their potential role as part of the worldwide efforts to eradicate polio.

Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a new small molecule drug that may serve as a treatment against multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease that cannot be cured with conventional therapies. They describe their findings in a paper published recently in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters.

Every day, every bed in an Ebola treatment unit creates approximately 300 liters of liquid waste. Managing this waste has been a challenge in the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with partners to ensure this waste is effectively decontaminated and no longer poses a threat to health.

Virginia Tech biochemists are trying to deliver a stern wake-up call to the parasite that causes sleeping sickness. Scientists identified a protein, called proliferating cell nuclear antigen or PCNA, that is vital to the sleeping sickness parasite’s good health. Disrupting this protein with drugs could potentially make it impossible for the parasite to reproduce and survive, reducing the health dangers to its human hosts.

Competition among doctors’ offices, urgent care centers and retail medical clinics in wealthy areas of the U.S. often leads to an increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written per person, a team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has found.

The Rapid Isolation and Treatment of Ebola (RITE) strategy is helping to end the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, according to new data reported in this week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The strategy-a rapid, coordinated response to Ebola cases in remote areas-is now being used in Sierra Leone and Guinea.