News

In the developing world, Cryptosporidium parvum has long been the scourge of freshwater. A decade ago, it announced its presence in the United States, infecting over 400,000 people the largest waterborne-disease outbreak in the county's history. Its rapid ability to spread, combined with an incredible resilience to water decontamination techniques, such as chlorination, led the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United Sates to add C. parvum to its list of public bioterrorism agents. Currently, there are no reliable treatments for cryptosporidiosis, the disease caused by C. parvum, but that may be about to change with the identification of a target molecule by investigators at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC).

When golden staph (Staphylococcus aureus) enters our skin it can identify the key immune cells and 'nuke' our body's immune response. Now we know how, thanks to an international research group led by dermatologists from the Centenary Institute and the University of Sydney. Using state-of-the art microscopy techniques, the team identified the key immune cells that orchestrate the body's defenders against invading golden staph, and also how the bacteria can target and destroy these cells, circumventing the body's immune response. Golden staph is the multi-drug resistant bacterium that is the scourge of hospitals.

Medical zoologist Stephen Rich cant wait to get his hands on your ticks. As head of the Laboratory of Medical Zoology (LMZ) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Rich and colleagues collect thousands of ticks, dead or alive, extracted from people and pets and sent in from across the country, to help map the distribution of different kinds of the blood-sucking arachnids, and to categorize the many disease-causing pathogens they carry.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Philippine Department of Health have launched a vaccination campaign to prevent outbreaks of measles and polio among survivors of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda).