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When they are not busy attacking us, germs go after each other. But when viruses invade bacteria, it doesn’t always spell disaster for the infected microbes: Sometimes viruses actually carry helpful genes that a bacterium can harness to, say, expand its diet or better attack its own hosts.

Proper healthcare textiles management upholds infection principles, improves patient and healthcare worker safety, and helps hospitals mitigate risk related to infections and adverse events. This report examines healthcare textiles and laundry from many aspects, including infection prevention, microbiology, industrial hygiene, healthcare economics, and much more.

The discovery of a new regulatory component in an infectious bacterium could aid efforts to explain its ability to survive in the human body, report microbiologists at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and University of Maryland, College Park, in the journal Science.

With the largest Ebola outbreak in history raging through West Africa, understanding whether the virus is changing as it spreads through different populations can help responders know what treatments to use and also help research laboratories develop new tools to speed diagnosis in the field.