The 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst figures she has given about 60 vaccines already on a Friday in early December. She’s one of many nursing students called in for duty as the school tries to vaccinate as many of its 30,000 students as possible against meningitis B. “I definitely feel I [...]
Exposure to antibiotics in mothers may increase risk for inflammatory bowel diseases in their offspring. This is the finding of a study in mice led by researchers from NYU School of Medicine and published Nov. 27 in the journal Nature Microbiology. The study results center on the microbiome, the mix of bacterial species that live in [...]
At the beginning of November, a tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in Minnesota killed six people and made front page news. A single case in New York State made regional news last week. And so it goes, here in the U.S.. Wherever it appears, TB is an unexpected and frightening intrusion likely to draw media attention. In [...]
On February 8, 2017, a suspected case of mumps in a member of a fraternity or sorority at the University of Washington, Seattle campus (UW) was reported to Public Health—Seattle & King County (PHSKC). Additional confirmed and probable mumps cases were subsequently identified among UW students and staff members according to the national case definition.* [...]
Genetic resource will help develop new tools to support the campaign against malaria in Africa Populations of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes sampled in Africa, by country. For full-sized image, please click here. Image: Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature24995 The largest-ever genetic study of mosquitoes reveals the movement of insecticide resistance between different regions of Africa and finds several rapidly evolving insecticide resistance [...]
A new study by French scientists suggests the rise of ampicillin resistance in a strain of Salmonella may have begun before the antibiotic was ever used in humans. Ampicillin, a widely used broad-spectrum, semi-synthetic derivative of penicillin, was first marketed in the United Kingdom in 1961 and introduced in other European countries shortly thereafter. But it wasn't [...]
"Whenever you do something new it ruffles feathers." That's how Rajesh Prabhu, MD, an infectious disease specialist and the chief patient safety officer with Essentia Health of Duluth, Minn., explained the company's decision to mandate that all healthcare employees, staff, and volunteers get the seasonal flu vaccine this year, a decision that led to dozens [...]
A case report yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases is raising questions about a livestock-associated drug-resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus that has emerged in recent years on pig farms but has rarely been linked to human illness. The paper describes a 61-year-old Iowa pig farmer who reported a chronic skin infection on his foot, caused by S aureus bacteria, in July 2011. [...]
Unprecedented progress against malaria—a key public health achievement over the past few years—has stalled, and an estimated 5 million more cases were reported in 2016 than the year before, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO's) annual report today on the status of the battle against the disease. One of the major problems is insufficient [...]
According to Asthma UK, currently 5.4 million people suffer from asthma, however, “every day the lives of three families are devastated by the death of a loved one to an asthma attack, and tragically two thirds of these deaths are preventable”. In 2016 in England and Wales alone, a shocking 1,237 people died from an [...]
