Research will help advance TB vaccine development. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded $30 million in first-year funding to establish new centers for immunology research to accelerate progress in tuberculosis (TB) vaccine development. New and improved TB vaccines are badly needed. Over the past 200 [...]
The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom are alerting their citizens to the possibility that there may be unreported Ebola cases in Tanzania. The information — posted on the websites of the U.S. State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and its counterpart, Public Health England — relates to concerning [...]
I study infectious diseases for a living. I’m also a mom of three kids. So every fall, I schedule an appointment with the pediatrician for my youngest and drag the older kids with me to a pharmacy, and we all get our flu shots. I do this even though I know that, most years, the [...]
Flu season has officially started in the U.S. and there are already reports of cases across the country. While technically everyone is at risk of developing the flu (yes, even with a flu shot), an interesting new study found that living in certain areas of a city can influence your flu risk. The study, which [...]
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported on Wednesday there’s been a fourth death in the commonwealth from Eastern equine encephalitis, bringing the nationwide total to 10 deaths. An area hospital notified state officials of the death. The patient lived in Essex County. There have also been three deaths in Michigan, two in Connecticut and one [...]
Modern retroviral therapies have done a good job of turning HIV/AIDS into a treatable chronic illness, but except in a few rare experimental cases using stem cell transplants, there is no cure. Cure, in this case, meaning that the HIV virus is completely eradicated in the patient. Retroviral therapies cause the virus to become inactive, but they [...]
New guidelines for prevention Were you immunized against mumps as a child? Many people were. Yet, sadly, mumps is rebounding in the United States. Experts consider the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to be 90 percent effective, and usually, two doses offer sufficient protection. However, in response to a growing mumps problem, public health authorities recently updated MMR vaccine guidelines. Credit: iStock, [...]
About 48 million people in the U.S. (1 in 6) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a significant public health burden that is largely preventable. The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is transforming the [...]
The number of Ebola cases continues to slowly rise in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) outbreak, with four more cases reported today, as global health officials released their latest overview of needs to prevent more spread to the DRC’s neighbors through the end of the year. In other developments, the World Health Organization [...]
The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) yesterday recommended that only pregnant women should be screened for asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB), based on findings of a moderate net benefit in reducing perinatal complications. The findings appear in an evidence report, published yesterday in JAMA, that found that screening and treatment for ASB—the presence of bacteria in the urine [...]
