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Herd immunity occurs when the majority of a population develops immunity against a contagious disease either through vaccination or due to a previous infection. This significantly reduces the likeliness of disease transmission from one person to another. Image Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock.com What is herd immunity? The development of herd immunity is an important way of gaining protection from contagious diseases, such […]
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Sometimes the end of an intestinal infection is just the beginning of more misery. Of those who contract traveler’s diarrhea, for example, an unlucky few go on to develop irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a chronic inflammation of the intestinal tract. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how this happens, but some think an infection may contribute to IBS by damaging the gut […]
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A new study led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine revealed how in utero Zika virus infection can lead to microcephaly in newborns. The team discovered that the Zika virus protein NS4A disrupts brain growth by hijacking a pathway that regulates the generation of new neurons. The findings point at the possibility of developing therapeutic strategies to prevent microcephaly […]
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Nearly half of all nursing homes do not have adequately trained infection prevention staff and their efforts to combat the over prescription of antibiotics are suffering as a result, according to a new study in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC), the journal of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Elderly nursing home residents are more […]
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(HealthDay)—Among women giving birth, the rates of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection increased more than 400 percent from 2000 to 2015, with rates much higher among those with opioid use disorder, according to research published in the Oct. 4 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Jean Y. Ko, Ph.D., from the […]
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Antibodies are currently in use to treat diseases that range from cancer to autoimmunity and are usually administered to patients in multiple doses, much like medical drugs. However, the production and storage of antibodies are comparatively more expensive, with considerable interest on finding alternative strategies to deliver them. In a recent study, Howell F. Moffett and an interdisciplinary research team […]
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New research sheds light on how a hepatitis B viral protein stimulates the expansion of immune cells that impair antiviral responses, according to a study published April 18 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Haitao Guo of the Indiana University School of Medicine, Bin Wang and Jiming Zhang of Fudan University, and colleagues. The findings potentially explain how the […]
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Since its implementation in 2009, the National Australian Hand Hygiene Initiative (NHHI) has seen significant, sustained improvements in hand hygiene compliance among Australian healthcare workers, and reduced risks of potentially fatal healthcare-associated Staphylococcus aureus infection, according to new research being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Amsterdam, Netherlands (13-16 April), and published […]
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Researchers from Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and Lion TCR have demonstrated that they were able to engineer HBV-specific T cells, a type of immune cells found in the body, to treat Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a commonly occurring liver cancer. The treatment was also individualised, as T cells that were engineered were specific to the patients. The approach […]
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A large, multi-center study refutes earlier suggestions that antiviral drugs for treating hepatitis C may lead to a higher recurrence of liver cancer. Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center studied the records of patients who had been successfully treated for liver cancer at 31 medical centers in North America, comparing those who were and were not given direct-acting antivirals for […]
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