Immunology

First Probable Person To Person Transmission Of New Bird Flu Virus In China

An article in BMJ reports on the first instance of probable person-to-person transmission of the new avian influenza A (H7N9) virus, which was recently identified in Eastern China.  As of June 30th 2013, 133 cases had been reported, resulting in 43 deaths ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 6 2013 - 9:02pm

New Study Casts Doubt On Correlation Between Income And Obesity

Obesity has risen for decades and social scientists and government officials have scrambled to link cause and correlation, proposing everything from low income to public parks to a thrifty phenotype hypothesis, which says that poor people are biologically ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 8 2013 - 9:01am

Probiotics Have No Impact On Crohn's Disease Remission

More people are seeking natural alternatives to medicine and products containing probiotics have flooded the marketplace. Probiotics are safe and tolerable but their value remains unknown. Studies are being done with specific illnesses to see if probiotics ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 19 2013 - 7:01am

Tuberculosis Genomes Show Why It's A Wildly Successful Pathogen

Tuberculosis (TB) is a wildly successful pathogen, if your goal is to infect up to two billion people in every corner of the world, with a new infection of a human host every second. A new analysis of dozens of tuberculosis genomes gathered from around th ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2013 - 4:22pm

Protein Phosphorylation Not The Culprit In Parkinson's Disease- Study

It is generally accepted that Parkinson's disease is aggravated when a specific protein is transformed by an enzyme but a new study found instead that this transformation tends to protect against the progression of the disease.  Parkinson's dise ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 26 2013 - 4:21pm

Stopping The Sunlight Induced DNA Crash Of Lupus

The sweetness of summer vacations can quickly turn sour for those affected by lupus erythematosus. For them, absorption of the UV-light component in sunlight may cause florid inflammation and redness of the skin. Lupus erythematosus (LE) is an autoimmune ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2013 - 11:44am

E. Coli O157 Vaccine In Cattle Could Cut Human Cases Of Infection By 85 Percent

A new paper has found that vaccinating cattle against the E. coli O157 bacterium could cut the number of human cases of the disease by 85%. The bacteria, which cause severe gastrointestinal illness and death in humans, are spread by consuming contaminated ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 16 2013 - 4:22pm

Pathogen Sleuthing A False Alarm On Hepatitis

Reports of a new hepatitis virus earlier this year were a false alarm, according to U.C. San Francisco researchers who correctly identified the virus as a contaminant present in a type of glassware used in many research labs. The finding highlights both t ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 26 2013 - 9:47am

Why You Got Herpes (Beyond The Obvious)

Researchers have managed to measure the internal pressure that enables the herpes virus to infect cells in the human body, a discovery which paves the way for the development of new medicines to combat viral infections and indicates ways to stop herpes in ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 2 2013 - 10:12am

New Therapeutic Targets May Benefit Leukemia Patients

New therapeutic targets and drugs may someday benefit people with certain types of leukemia or blood cancer. Pre-clinical and pharmacological models found that cancer cells with a mutation in the KIT receptor-- an oncogenic/cancerous form of the receptor- ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 5 2013 - 12:52pm