Free Republic

Ever since people in the Middle East started dying of a mysterious new infection last year, scientists have been trying to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. Now they may finally have found a clue in an unlikely population: retired racing camels.

DENVER — A Colorado man who died of West Nile virus last year was likely infected through a blood transfusion, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. The man, who was undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, began developing West Nile symptoms after 29 days in the hospital, sharply narrowing the number of ways he could have been exposed to the virus, according to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. He died after 47 days in the hospital. Eighteen days prior to showing symptoms, the patient received a blood transfusion that health officials now believe contained...

A new drug candidate has shown promising signs in treating tuberculosis. The synthetic molecule is effective in mice and bears no similarity to existing TB drugs, many of which have become inadequate as drug-resistant bacterial strains have developed. If it is shown to be safe and effective in humans, it could help to combat a disease that killed 1.4 million people in 2011. A team led by Kevin Pethe, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute Korea near Seoul, investigated more than 120,000 compounds over 5 years, infecting mouse immune cells called macrophages with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the bacterium that causes...

Scientists have discovered a marine microbe-derived antibiotic that has the ability to kill the deadly Anthrax bacterium Bacillus anthracis and other pathogens such as the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.Bacillus anthracis spores as viewed in scanning electron microscopy (© National Academy of Engineering) Prof William Fenical with colleagues from the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography first collected Streptomyces sp. - a marine microorganism that produces the compound – in 2012 from sediments close to shore off Santa Barbara, California.Using an analytical technique known as spectroscopy, they then deciphered the unusual structure of a molecule isolated from Streptomyces sp....

Herpes simplex virus 1 has an internal pressure eight times higher than a car tire, and uses it to literally blast its DNA into human cells, according to a new study published online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.Dr Alex Evilevitch and his colleagues provide the first experimental evidence of a high internal pressure of tens of atmospheres within Herpes simplex virus 1, resulting from the confined genome. NPC – nuclear pore complex (Bauer DW et al) The study provides the first experimental evidence of high internal pressure within a virus that infects humans – a phenomenon previously...

The triatomine beetles that transmit Chagas disease are known as kissing bugs because they tend to feed on peopleÂ’s facesScientists in the US and Spain have synthesised the combinations of sugars from the surface of the Chagas disease parasite that trigger the human immune response to it. This could help establish better diagnostic tests for the disease, and even a vaccine.Chagas disease is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. The parasite is transmitted by contaminated food, blood transfusions and blood sucking beetles commonly known as kissing bugs. After a phase of acute local infection, the disease becomes chronic and can...

Public-health officials discount role of sex in people's response to flu and other infections. Sabra Klein came to the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction this week armed with a message that might seem obvious to scientists who obsess over sex: men and women are different. But it is a fact often overlooked by health researchers, says Klein, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research on influenza viruses in mice, presented at the meeting in Montreal, Canada, helps explain why women are more susceptible to death and...

Microbiologists are trying to work out whether use of antibiotics on farms is fuelling the human epidemic of drug-resistant bacteria. The sight of just one boot coming through the doorway cues the clatter of tiny hoofs as 500 piglets scramble away from Mike Male. “That's the sound of healthy pigs,” shouts Male, a veterinarian who has been working on pig farms for more than 30 years. On a hot June afternoon, he walks down the central aisle of a nursery in eastern Iowa, scoops up a piglet and dangles her by her hind legs. A newborn piglet's navel is an...

By differentiating between bacterial and viral fevers, a new test may help doctors decide whether to prescribe antibiotics. Fevers are a common symptom of many infectious diseases, but it can be difficult to tell whether viruses or bacteria are the cause. By measuring gene activity in the blood of 22 sick children, Gregory Storch, a pediatrician and infectious disease researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues were able to distinguish bacteria-sparked fevers from ones kindled by viruses. The activity of hundreds of genes changed as the children’s immune systems responded to the pathogens, but the team found that...

Researchers have isolated an antibody that can be used to test for Yersinia pestis © Rocky Mountain Laboratories NIAID, NIH Plague could soon be diagnosed faster than ever before, thanks to scientists in Germany. The group have pioneered a new, dipstick test which will drastically cut the time it takes to spot the disease. This could save many lives in developing countries, where modern outbreaks are concentrated, and where there is little access to the labs needed for conventional diagnosis methods.The team, from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, isolated an antibody which specifically recognises and binds...

Researchers at the University of Warwick have recovered tuberculosis (TB) genomes from the lung tissue of a 215-year old mummy using a technique known as metagenomics. The team, led by Professor Mark Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at Warwick Medical School, working with Helen Donoghue at University College London and collaborators in Birmingham and Budapest, sought to use the technique to identify TB DNA in a historical specimen. The term 'metagenomics' is used to describe the open-ended sequencing of DNA from samples without the need for culture or target-specific amplification or enrichment. This approach avoids the complex and unreliable workflows...

Some people harbor a strain of bacteria that chews through cardiac medication The next time you pop a pill, know that the microbes in your gut might get to it before you do. Some people harbor a strain of bacteria that inactivates a common cardiac drug, a finding that could explain why people have different reactions to some medications. “Microbes have long been known to ‘steal’ drugs by converting them into inactive forms,” says Peter Turnbaugh of Harvard University, who led the study. But picking out the specific culprits among the gut’s throngs of bacterial suspects has been a challenge...

Enlarge Image Air travel. Ferret studies show that H7N9 can move via respiratory droplets from intentionally infected animals in one cage to their neighbors. Credit: Sander Herfst Since a new bird flu virus began sickening and killing people in China in March, one of the most pressing questions has been whether the virus, H7N9, would easily spread from human to human, possibly kicking off a global pandemic. Fortunately, no convincing signs of such transmission surfaced, and the outbreak—which led affected Chinese cities to close poultry markets and cull birds—seems to have ground to a halt. But three new studies...

Genome of largest viruses yet discovered hints at 'fourth domain' of life. The organism was initially called NLF, for “new life form”. Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, evolutionary biologists at Aix-Marseille University in France, found it in a water sample collected off the coast of Chile, where it seemed to be infecting and killing amoebae. Under a microscope, it appeared as a large, dark spot, about the size of a small bacterial cell. Later, after the researchers discovered a similar organism in a pond in Australia, they realized that both are viruses — the largest yet found. Each is around...

As moratorium lifts, oversight is put in place to assess studies on eradicated cattle virus. Research is set to resume on the rinderpest virus, the cause of a deadly cattle disease that was declared eradicated in 2011 and has been off limits for study ever since. The moratorium — part of efforts to guard against accidental or intentional release of virus that could reintroduce the disease — was lifted on 10 July and replaced by a new international oversight system for such research. In its heyday, the disease — the only one other than smallpox to be eradicated from nature...

Enlarge Image Crowd control? Public health experts worry that the annual hajj could increase the incidence of MERS. Credit: Bluemangoa2z/Wikimedia Commons The World Health Organization (WHO) is convening an emergency committee to determine whether the novel coronavirus that emerged in the Middle East last year constitutes a "public health emergency of international concern." Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment at the WHO, announced the move at a press conference today in Geneva. Fukuda said the committee would be drawn from a roster established under International Health Regulations and include experts in public health, epidemiology, virology and...

The cyclodextrin can block the Wza pore and prevent E. coli from suiting up © NPGUK researchers have found a way to weaken the molecular armour of Escherichia coli to allow the host's immune system to attack and kill the pathogen. The discovery could pave the way for new antibiotic drugs that make it harder for pathogenic bacteria to develop resistance.Antibiotic resistance is one of the world's most pressing public health concerns. As bacteria quickly mutate to become resistant, the effectiveness of antibiotic drugs aimed at current targets are diminishing. An alarming trend in recent years is the emergence of...

Enlarge Image Laid low. A cholera ward in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a country where nearly half the people are infected with the cholera bacterium by age 15. Credit: Mark Knobil/Creative Commons Cholera kills thousands of people a year, but a new study suggests that the human body is fighting back. Researchers have found evidence that the genomes of people in Bangladesh—where the disease is prevalent—have developed ways to combat the disease, a dramatic case of human evolution happening in modern times. Cholera has hitchhiked around the globe, even entering Haiti with UN peacekeepers in 2010, but the disease's heartland is...

Enlarge Image Seconds count. When a laser beam, pulsing at an average of once every 760 nanoseconds (left), is absorbed by red blood cells, the cells release sound waves that far exceed 100MhZ (right). Credit: Strohm et al., Biophysical Journal (2013) Combining lasers with a principle discovered by Alexander Graham Bell over 100 years ago, researchers have developed a new way to collect high-resolution information about the shape of red blood cells. Because diseases like malaria can alter the shape of the body's cells, the device may provide a way to accurately diagnose various blood disorders. The study relies...

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have imaged the atom-by-atom structure of the ribosome attached to a molecule that controls its motion for the first time, providing a step forward for the development of better antibiotics.The above image may look like a tangle of squiggly lines, but youÂ’re actually looking at a molecular machine called a ribosome. Its job is to translate DNA sequences into proteins, the workhorse compounds that sustain you and all living things.The image is also a milestone. ItÂ’s the first time the atom-by-atom structure of the ribosome has been seen as itÂ’s attached to a...