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Despite progress in combating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the U.S. since its peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, hospital-acquired AMR infections remain well above pre-pandemic levels, according to a major new study examining AMR before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic in 120 US hospitals. The study was led by Dr. Christina Yek from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and is being presented at this year's ESCMID Global Congress (formerly ECCMID) in Barcelona, Spain (27-30 April). It reveals that AMR rates remain high largely due to the persistence...

The best case for a right to party is in the right of assembly, placed in the Bill of Rights as many deadly diseases threatened the American population.In Alexander Pushkin’s “Feast in a Time of Plague,” an old priest returning from a mass funeral of plague victims catches young people partying, and unleashes a 19th-century rant: “A godless banquet, godless madmen all … Go back now to your homes!” “Be off, old man!” The partygoers yell back in a period version of “OK, Boomer.” Another tells the priest: “Our homes are sad. And youth is fond of joyousness.”Human nature remains...

Herd immunity is exactly what the spike in cases indicates is developing, and we need it to continue. Politicians have been reimposing and maintaining lockdowns and mask mandates due to media furor over “spikes” in coronavirus cases. This has happened in 21 states and many more localities, says The New York Times. One of the many problems with this is that the nation needs people to keep getting coronavirus.That’s because coronavirus spread is a natural vaccine that protects those who survive — which is the vast majority — and even those who don’t catch it, through herd immunity. This natural...

The U.S. government is taking wise measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, as the saying goes, we should pray like it all depends on God and prepare like it all depends on us. When I was in school studying infectious disease epidemiology, none of the cool kids worked on flu. We all wanted to chase Ebola, HIV/AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, and other exotic killer bugs.Everyday, ho-hum killers like influenza, pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses were just too mundane for globetrotting adventurers like us. Who wants to spend her life hand-sanitizing and finger-wagging about vaccines when you could...

BURLINGTON, Vt. — Epidemiologists at the Vermont Department of Health are concealing the number of refugees with contagious active tuberculosis nearly a month after Watchdog reported that more than one-third of Vermont’s resettled refugees test positive for TB. Earlier this month, Watchdog revealed that 35 percent of Vermont’s incoming refugees in the past four years tested positive for tuberculosis. How many of those cases are contagious and symptomatic, however, remains a secret, as state epidemiologists and top officials at the Health Department have spent weeks blocking efforts to obtain the data. Refugees brought to the United States take TB tests...

Four refugees sent to Indiana by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2015 were diagnosed with active tuberculosis once they arrived in the Hoosier State, according to the Indiana Department of Health. Active tuberculosis (TB) is infectious, while so-called “latent TB” is not infectious. But 10 percent of those infected with latent TB develop active infectious TB. In 2015, almost 400 migrants with latent TB settled in Indiana, according to state records. The state’s TB rate had declined for the 54 years up to 2010, but is now increasing as more migrants settle in the state. “Tuberculosis is one...

Médecins Sans Frontières in West Africa “2015 was a very busy year for emerging infectious diseases.” - Steven Hatfill, MD Dedicating his lecture to Médecins Sans Frontières, for their heroic actions in West Africa, Dr. Hatfill spoke to a captivated audience at the 33rd Annual Conference of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in California about the 43 newly emerging infectious diseases that jumped to a larger geographic area from their wild animal hosts to human populations in the past 30 years.

A health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital has tested positive for Ebola after a preliminary test, the hospital said in a statement. Confirmatory testing will be conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The employee helped care for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States. Duncan died on Wednesday.

U.S. government has no plans to take decisive action to stop Ebola from coming here. Have no plans to take the extraordinary means of decontaminating that is required with so deadly a virus It has taken five days for authorities to get around to decontaminating the apartment of Liberian Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan. Five days with a level four hot bioagent alive and well in a crowded apartment complex. And when they finally got to it they hired a private firm that specializes in chemical spills, not deadly biological agents. Why wasn’t USAAMRID, the United States Army Medical Research...

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (AFP) - Iraq could unleash a biological attack on the West by using unsuspecting people traveling abroad as carriers of deadly germs, a prominent Iraqi defector warned late Thursday. Nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza, who left Iraq in 1994 and now lives in the United States, told the US Congress he suspected the Iraqi security service, which runs the country's biological weapons program, had already used people traveling abroad to reunite with relatives to infect exiled dissidents with the deadly AIDS virus. "An angle rarely reported -- and I found extensive incidents regarding it when I left...

Marchetta could not find anyone who regularly cleaned their reusable bags. Marchetta brought the lab results to Dr. Michelle Barron, the infectious disease expert at the University of Colorado Hospital. "Wow. Wow. That is pretty impressive," said Barron. Barron examines lab results for a living. "Oh my goodness! This is definitely the highest count," Barron commented while looking at the bacteria count numbers. She admitted she was shocked at what was found at the bottom of the bags. "We're talking in the million range of bacteria," she said. Marchetta used swabs provided by a local lab to test several grocery...

Manhattan Kansas - Center of Hoof and Mouth Research? Should This Dangerous Disease Stay Where it Is? By W Thomas Payne

In the US, most deaths are attributable to chronic afflictions, such as heart disease and cancer. Typically the medical community has attributed these diseases to accumulated damage, such as plaque formation in arteries or mutations in genes controlling cellular replication. This view is changing. Scientists are now beginning to recognize that many of these chronic illnesses are due to microbial infections. A recent report in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that schizophrenia, a mental illness leading to errors in perception, is associated with the pathogen, Toxoplasma gondii. "Our findings reveal the strongest association we've seen yet between infection with...

Tuesday, 30 October 2007, 11:55 GMT Blood findings bring malaria hope Researchers could be a step closer to a cure for malaria after discovering people with blood group O are naturally protected from its most severe forms. Edinburgh University has found blood type O people are significantly less likely to experience the most life-threatening effects of malaria. It is hoped the discovery will help develop drugs which mimic the properties of red cells. Red cells in O group blood prevent malaria worsening. "We may be able to reduce the number of children dying from severe malaria in sub-Saharan Africa"Dr...

ARLINGTON - Four Bowie High School students have tested positive for tuberculosis after they were exposed to another Bowie student who had contracted the disease, a Tarrant County Public Health Department official said Thursday...

Deer and elk that are infected with mad cow-like disease, known as chronic wasting disease (CWD), carry infectious agents called prions in their leg muscles, indicating that those handling and eating infected deer meat may contract the same disease, University of Kentucky researchers reported on Jan. 26 in the journal Science. This newfound evidence is shocking because the public has been informed that the infectious prion protein for CWD was only present in parts of the nervous system such as brains and backbones. It was thought in the past that only nervous tissues from infected deer were susceptible to spreading...

Bioterrorism has been in the minds of millions of Americans ever since the 'anthrax letters' were sent just after 9/11. Unlike conventional terrorism, where a bomb blast is a clear sign that something has happened, biowarfare methods such as spraying viruses into the air or polluting water sources are silent and often leave no visible trace. How do we know if something has happened, and, more importantly, what do we do about it? Israeli scientists are coming up with answers from several different angles.

It is this reporter's opinion that the Congress of the United States acted tragically against America's best interests when it shot down Dana Rohrabacher's illegal alien medical bill, HR 3722. Powerful interests representing hospitals, pharmaceuticals, etc., acted against us. All the bill asked was that illegal aliens - violators of our sovereignty - be identified as illegal! But this is a sad, continuing story and particularly in those states that border on Mexico, where we witness a steady, silent, pervasive invasion of the U.S. by an unarmed army carrying an assembly line of diseases into the heart of America. And...

The human rights committee of the National Academy of Sciences is protesting the government's treatment of a researcher who faces trial on charges of smuggling vials of live plague bacteria from Tanzania and lying to federal agents about them. The scientist, Dr. Thomas C. Butler, a leading plague researcher who is chief of the infectious diseases division at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, set off a scare in January, when he reported 30 vials of bacteria missing. Later, Dr, Butler told F.B.I. agents that the vials might have already been destroyed, according to the bureau's affidavit. He was arrested and...

15 March 2003 | GENEVA -- During the past week, WHO has received reports of more than 150 new suspected cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia for which cause has not yet been determined. Reports to date have been received from Canada, China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Early today, an ill passenger and companions who travelled from New York, United States, and who landed in Frankfurt, Germany were removed from their flight and taken to hospital isolation. Due to the spread of SARS to several countries...