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Although TB was close to being eradicated in the developed world, it is a major problem in developing countries. With drug-resistant strains on the increase, Clare Sansom outlines the latest in the fight against this killer disease From a historical viewpoint, what is the world’s most deadly infectious disease? Tuberculosis (TB) must be one of the strongest contenders. The disease that the seventeenth-century writer John Bunyan described as ‘the captain of all the men of death’ is still rightly feared today. Despite some recent progress, the latest figures released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) show that there were an...

Scientists have developed a way to grow iron-oxidizing bacteria using electricity instead of iron, an advance that will allow them to better study the organisms and could one day be used to turn electricity into fuel. The study will be published on January 29 in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The method, called electrochemical cultivation, supplies these bacteria with a steady supply of electrons that the bacteria use to respire, or "breathe". It opens the possibility that one day electricity generated from renewable sources like wind or solar could be funneled to iron oxidizing...

People with one form of IFITM3 more likely to develop pneumonia Chinese people carrying a particular version of an immune system gene are up to six times more likely to develop severe influenza than those lacking the variant. In a previous study involving mostly people of European descent, scientists found that a few individuals carried a particular form of a gene known as IFITM3 and got hit especially hard by the flu. In China, the variant is much more common...

Enlarge Image Hitching a ride. Hurricanes lift many kinds of microbes into the atmosphere, where they can survive for days or even weeks. Credit: iStockphoto/Thinkstock Each year, hundreds of millions of metric tons of dust, water, and humanmade pollutants make their way into the atmosphere, often traveling between continents on jet streams. Now a new study confirms that some microbes make the trip with them, seeding the skies with billions of bacteria and other organisms—and potentially affecting the weather. What's more, some of these high-flying organisms may actually be able to feed while traveling through the clouds, forming an...

An international group of scientists this week ended a year-long moratorium on controversial work to engineer potentially deadly strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus in the lab. Researchers agreed to temporarily halt the work in January 2012, after a fierce row erupted over whether it was safe to publish two papers reporting that the introduction of a handful of mutations enabled the H5N1 virus to spread efficiently between ferrets, a model of flu in mammals (see Nature http://doi.org/fxv55r; 2012). Both papers were eventually published, one in Nature1 and one in Science2. Now, in a letter simultaneously published on 23...

As someone who cares for about 100 raccoons a year, Melanie Piazza knows that a listless, placid raccoon is not a healthy one. "A lot of the calls were, 'There's a raccoon sitting on my porch and he hasn't moved all day, and I open the door and he doesn't move,' and that's not normal," said Piazza, the director of animal care at WildCare, a wildlife refuge in San Rafael and one of several Bay Area care centers baffled in recent years by a rise in strange raccoon behavior. The centers would occasionally collect raccoons like this and try to...

Antioxidant-producing microbes may keep atherosclerotic plaques in place Though atherosclerosis is an artery problem, microscopic denizens of the intestines may play a surprising role in how the disease plays out. A new study suggests that different mixes of intestinal microbes may determine whether people will have heart attacks or strokes brought on by break-away plaque from the arteries. Compared with healthy people, heart disease patients who have had strokes or other complications of atherosclerosis carry fewer microbes that make anti-inflammatory compounds. These patients also have more bacteria that produce inflammation-triggering molecules, researchers report online December 4 in Nature Communications. Inflammation...

Studies of gut bacteria are beginning to untangle how diet affects health in old age — but determining cause and effect is tricky. Almost everything about eating gets more difficult with age. Elderly people typically cannot taste or smell as well as they used to, decreasing the appeal of some foods. Dental issues or a dry mouth can impede chewing; loss of muscle tone in the pharynx can make swallowing difficult; constipation and the side effects of medication can make digestion uncomfortable; and decreased mobility makes a chore of grocery shopping or cooking complex meals. Little wonder that older people...

Scientists in the US and China have come up with a low-risk treatment for bacterial infections in a deep wound.Treating infections has long been a challenge for healthcare professionals, and infections caused by drug resistant bacteria have made this task even more difficult to manage. Recently, the genome of an MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) outbreak in a hospital was sequenced to identify the source of infection, track its spread and avoid an outbreak.1 Such extreme measures of tracing infection need an equally tough bactericide. X-ray irradiation is known to have bactericidal properties; however, the high doses needed and the associated...

Credit: Benjamin Bomfleur; (inset) Hans Kerp/Muenster University Cocoons don't just protect developing eggs and larvae; they can also preserve fossils for hundreds of millions of years. Scientists have discovered a 25-micrometer-long, teardrop-shaped protozoan (left) trapped in the wall of an egg case produced by a leech between 200 million and 215 million years ago. The Triassic-era relic's coiled stalk and large, horseshoe-shaped nucleus make it an ancient doppelgänger of the modern-day Vorticella (right), a group previously unknown in the fossil record, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As soft-bodied organisms, protozoans...

Enlarge Image Risky science. The U.S. government is proposing special reviews for experiments that might increase the risk posed by the H5N1 avian influenza virus (brown). Credit: Wikimedia Researchers are giving mixed reviews to a draft U.S. government plan to subject some grant requests for studies involving the H5N1 avian influenza virus to special reviews—and perhaps even require the work to be kept secret. Elements of the plan have been "very controversial within [the] U.S. government" committee that developed it, Amy Patterson, associate director for science policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, told a...

Enlarge Image New approach. The new vaccine does not use the two proteins on the flu virus's surface, shown here as blue and red spikes, but mRNA encoding one of them. Credit: CDC A new vaccine strategy could make flu shots cheaper, safer, and easier to produce. Using synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) instead of proteins purified from viruses, German scientists have shown they can protect mice, ferrets, and pigs against influenza. "This is a very interesting new approach," says Hans-Dieter Klenk, a virologist at the University of Marburg in Germany who was not involved in the work. Now, most...

Data Published in Nature Biotechnology Show Messenger (m)RNA Prophylactic Vaccines Based on CureVac's RNActive® Technology Demonstrate Immunogenicity and Protection Against Influenza Virus Infection -- RNActive Vaccine Technology Allows Fast Production in Response to a Pandemic Scenario -- RNActive Vaccines Are Stable at High Temperatures Which Makes Them Suitable for Easy Worldwide Supply -- RNActive Vaccines May Become a Novel, Broadly Applicable and Easy-to-Handle Prophylactic Class of Vaccine Against Infectious Diseases TUEBINGEN, Germany, Nov. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- CureVac GmbH, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing a new class of therapies and vaccines based on mRNA, and the German Federal Research...

Whole-genome analysis helps identify source of MRSA outbreak on infant ward. A superbug outbreak that plagued a special-care neonatal unit in Cambridge, UK, for several months last year was brought to an end by insights gained from genome sequencing. The case, reported today in Lancet Infectious Disease, marks the first time that scientists have sequenced pathogen genomes to actively control an ongoing outbreak1. Sharon Peacock, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, and her team became involved in the outbreak after three infants at nearby Rosie Hospital’s 24-cot special-care baby unit tested positive for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) within...

Enlarge Image Microbial menace. A cocktail of gut bacteria may one day be used to treat the chronic diarrhea caused by this bacterium. Credit: David Goulding Genome Research Limited A tonic of gut microbes may be the secret recipe for treating a common hospital scourge. Researchers have pinpointed the exact mix of microbes required to cure mice of a chronic infection by a hard-to-treat bacterium that causes bloating, pain, and diarrhea in people. A similar bacterial cocktail may one day be able to replace a controversial treatment involving the intake of fecal matter to restore the right balance of...

Enlarge Image Harboring trouble. A new study suggests venomous cottonmouths may harbor Eastern equine encephalitis virus through the winter. Credit: iStockphoto/Thinkstock Every year as the days grow warmer, the Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) reemerges along the eastern coast of the United States, where it causes devastating disease in horses and, more rarely, humans. Scientists have long wondered how the virus, which is transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito, survives the cold, mosquito-killing North American winters. Now, a new study suggests that snakes harbor the virus through the winter, but experts disagree on whether the finding clinches...

Transport proteins show 4,000-fold preference for phosphate over arsenate.A bacterium that some scientists thought could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorus it can find.The finding clears up a lingering question sparked by a controversial study1, published in Science in 2010, which claimed that the GFAJ-1 microbe could thrive in the high-arsenic conditions of Mono Lake in California without metabolizing phosphorus — an element that is essential for all forms of life.Although this and other key claims of the paper were later undermined (see 'Study challenges existence...

For years historians, epidemiologists, and virologists have been attempting to peel back the cobwebs of time in order to analyze the deadliest pandemic in human history; the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. John Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History, has probably done more to reawaken memories of that awful time than any other source, but many gaps in our knowledge remain. Jeffrey K. Taubenberger and David Morens - both researchers at NIAID – have added considerably to our understanding of the H1N1 virus and the events surrounding its emergence. Taubenberger was the first to...

Menachem Shoham, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, has discovered novel antivirulence drugs that, without killing the bacteria, render Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) and Streptococcus pyogenes, commonly referred to as strep, harmless by preventing the production of toxins that cause disease. The promising discovery was presented this week at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco. MRSA infections are a growing public health concern, causing 20,000 to 40,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. It is the most prevalent bacterial pathogen in hospital settings and in...

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...