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(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers from the U.S., Germany and Israel has found that mice are able to ward off fungal lung infections because their immune systems cause fungal spores to die. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes the means by which they discovered how mice are able to ward off fungal lung infections and what their findings might mean for human patients. Fungus is all around us, so much so that most people breathe in approximately 1000 fungal spores every single day. But the means by which people ward off fungal infections in the...

"We take a virus, learn how it works and then we leverage it," said Dr. Michael Diamond, a professor of molecular microbiology, pathology and immunology. "Let's take advantage of what it's good at, use it to eradicate cells we don't want. Take viruses that would normally do some damage and make them do some good."

In the rich world, cancer therapy is expensive. In the developing world, it may not be available at all. Not only is cutting-edge technology in short supply, but so are things like electricity and medical personnel. The lack of necessary resources for basic healthcare is made obvious by the fact that, if diagnosed with cancer, a person in the developing world is more likely to die from it than a person in the developed world. To help alleviate this problem, cheap, uncomplicated, portable, and preferably non-surgical treatments that do not require electricity are needed. Now, a team of researchers from...

Dear AMSA, The Charlottesville travesty was a direct affront to both AMSA and American values. As the AMSA(American Medical Student Association) Fellow, I strongly condemn and denounce racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist ideology, or any such ideals that seek to embrace racial or ethnic superiority at the expense of equality, social justice, and health, civil, and human rights. AMSA believes that these rights are essential to the protection of human dignity and are applicable to all individuals. We also respect the primacy of civil rights, even in the heightened need for security, and therefore condemn hate crimes. From Tamir...

BERLIN (AP) — A male nurse who was convicted of killing patients in Germany with overdoses of heart medication is now believed to have killed at least 86 people — and the true scale of the killings could be even larger, investigators said Monday. Many of the deaths could have been prevented if health authorities had acted more quickly on their suspicions, said Johann Kuehme, police chief in the northwestern city of Oldenburg.

Two days after his advisers said otherwise, President Trump said Thursday that he does plan to formally declare the opioid addiction crisis an emergency — as the commission he appointed to study the epidemic had recommended. “I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency,” he told reporters at his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., where he has been vacationing. “We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis. We’re going to draw it up and we’re going to make it a national emergency.” New Jersey Gov. Chris...

The damaged immune systems of diabetics can be ‘retrained’ to stop them destroying insulin, scientists believe, following successful trials of a pioneering new therapy. Researchers at King’s College London and Cardiff University showed that injecting patients with tiny protein fragments prevented immune cells from targeting vital insulin. Type 1 diabetes develops when a patient's immune system mistakenly attacks the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas. Without treatment the number of beta cells will slowly decrease and the body will no longer be able to maintain normal blood sugar (blood glucose) levels, leading to patients needing daily injections. But a...

The horrific treatment of Dr. Paul Church has become a nightmare – affecting him, of course, but ultimately all of us as well. Because he told the medical truth and refused to bow to political correctness on this critical public health issue, he has now been banned from four prominent Boston area hospitals and a urology clinic. This is the frightening state of today’s medical profession. Dr. Church is a urologist who was on the staff of several major Boston area hospitals and clinics for nearly 30 years. He was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He has done...

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State's College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient's own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells. Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced. We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Jesus Aponte pushes a door open to reveal hundreds of aromatic, spiky green plants, a crop that Puerto Rico hopes will help it ease a grinding economic crisis by generating millions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs. Aponte, a 29-year-old biologist and chemical engineer, had been thinking of joining the wave of young Puerto Rican professionals heading to the U.S. to seek work — an exodus that has aggravated the U.S. territory’s woes. But then he saw the saw the island’s medical marijuana industry start to expand, and found one of the...

New finding by UCLA expert is sure to stoke the debate over how to decide if someone’s really “dead” or notThree years after being declared brain dead following an ill-fated throat surgery at Children’s Hospital in Oakland and subsequently kept on life support, Jahi McMath continues to occupy a central role in the legal and philosophical debate over when a family should remove a loved one from life support. In the latest twist to the drama, a well-known neurologist has reviewed videos of McMath and says they prove she’s still alive after all, even if her brain is not functioning...

Two-year-old Eden Carlson lost a significant amount of brain tissue after spending 15 minutes underwater. Director of Hyperbaric Medicine, Dr. Paul Harch, says she made remarkable improvements after being treated with oxygen for 45 minutes twice a day. Weeks later, Eden’s parents brought her to New Orleans, and Harch put her in a hyperbaric chamber. “I dosed it at the same level of oxygen but now with pressure, and she made another very noticeable improvement with just the first hyperbaric treatment and from there just accelerated,” Harch said. In February of 2016, Eden escaped the baby gate in her home...

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates — possibly toxic, probably worthless. But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent? Cantrell called Roy Gerona, a University of California, San Francisco, researcher who specializes in analyzing chemicals. Gerona...

So Charlie Gard’s fate now comes down to this: whether an American doctor can persuade a British judge that little Charlie’s life is worth living. The child cannot see, cannot hear, and suffers from a genetic disorder for which there is no cure—yet he has exposed the great fault line between the post-Christian West and its past. For most of history, men and women have regarded suffering as part of life. But as medicine tames once-deadly afflictions and the idea of some larger meaning to the cosmos wanes, suffering comes to appear less a part of the natural order than...

A comparison of health systems in 11 wealthy nations has found the US falling short by multiple measures, while the UK’s National Health Service leads in several categories. “We measured performance quality across five domains, and the USA fell short in all five,” says Eric Schneider of the Commonwealth Fund think tank in Washington DC. The domains were ease of access to healthcare, how equal access is to people of different incomes, administrative efficiency, how well the care process works for people who use it, and how good the health outcomes are. The analysis included data from sources including the...

Lingering uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act has spurred the California legislature to consider adoption of a statewide single-payer health care system. Sometimes described as Medicare for all, single-payer is a system in which a public agency handles health care financing while the delivery of care remains largely in private hands.

Chemotherapy could allow cancer to spread, and trigger more aggressive tumours, a new study suggests. Researchers in the US studied the impact of drugs on patients with breast cancer and found medication increases the chance of cancer cells migrating to other parts of the body, where they are almost always lethal. Around 55,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Britain every year and 11,000 will die from their illness. Many are given chemotherapy before surgery, but the new research suggests that, although it shrinks tumours in the short term, it could trigger the spread of cancer cells around the...

After they suffered the loss of their 5 month old son who died one day after receiving eight vaccines, the broken hearted parents are taking up the cause of infant and childhood vaccine death and injuries to fight for America's most helpless and vulnerable victims. Unbelievably, the hospital cremated the infant and ruled Matthew's death was "UNDETERMINED." The couple's lawyer would not let the baby's mother Crystal view the autopsy report which "was one of the most difficult to look at" even though the lawyer had seen many autopsy reports. The parents had to wait well over two years to...

Ronald Reagan speaks out on Socialized Medicine, circa 1961. Audio file.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ&feature=youtu.be