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For the roughly 150,000 AIDS patients who come down with a life-threatening infection called fungal meningitis each year, there's only one treatment: a drug called fluconazole that works for less than half of patients. Now, a study suggests there may be a way to improve the odds—simply by changing what patients eat. In animal tests, the researchers found that taking fluconazole in combination with a low-carb, high-fat keto diet worked significantly better at killing the fungus than taking the medication alone. For the new study, the researchers wondered if a keto diet—which deprives the body of glucose by cutting carbohydrate...

Rapamycin is potentially the most powerful anti-aging drug ever discovered. However, due to its unlucky history, few know of it. Rapamycin is a paradoxical drug. It improves anti-cancer immunity, but it may also cause cancer. It protects against bacterial infection and halts viral replication, but it also suppresses the immune system. It reverses symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease but also increases plaque deposits in the brain. It improves metabolic function, but it also causes type 2 diabetes. This list of contradictions goes on and on; however, there is one thing about rapamycin that scientists tend to agree on: it is potentially...

A study has found that the antifungal drug Ciclopirox kills HIV in cell cultures -- and the virus doesn't bounce back when the drug is stopped. But the research has yet to be performed on people. A drug commonly prescribed to treat nail fungus appears to come with a not-so-tiny side effect: killing HIV in cell cultures.In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox rid infectious HIV from cell cultures, but the virus also doesn't bounce back when the drug is withheld. The same group of researchers had previously shown that Ciclopirox...

Nicotinamide, commonly known as vitamin B3, may help the innate immune system kill antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria, the so-called "superbugs". In lab work done with mice and human blood, researchers found high doses of the vitamin increased the ability of immune cells to kill the bacteria by 1,000 times.The discovery opens the door to a new arsenal of tools for dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, such as those caused by methicillin-resistant S. aureus or MRSA, that have killed thousands of people around the world. They are increasing in hospitals and nursing homes, and also rising in prisons, among athletes, people in...

Lavender oil could be used to combat the increasing incidence of antifungal-resistant infections, according to a study published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology. The essential oil shows a potent antifungal effect against strains of fungi responsible for common skin and nail infections. Scientists from the University of Coimbra in Portugal distilled lavender oil from the Lavandula viridis L'Hér shrub that grows in southern Portugal. The oil was tested against a range of pathogenic fungi and was found to be lethal to a range of skin-pathogenic strains, known as dermatophytes, as well as various species of Candida. Dermatophytes cause infections...

(IsraelNN.com) n the tropics, carnivorous plants trap unsuspecting prey in a cavity filled with liquid known as a "pitcher." The moment insects like flies, ants and beetles fall into a pitcher, the plant's enzymes are activated and begin dissolving their new meal, obtaining nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen which are difficult to extract from certain soils. Carnivorous plants also possess a highly developed set of compounds and secondary metabolites to aid in their survival. These compounds could serve as a new class of anti-fungal drugs for use in human medicine, says Prof. Aviah Zilberstein of Tel Aviv University's Department...