Immunology

Treatment Against Lethal Marburg Virus Developed

Tekmira Pharmaceuticals and collaborators at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, have protected nonhuman primates against Marburg virus, also known as Angola hemorrhagic fever. There are currently no vaccines or drugs approved for human u ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2014 - 7:30pm

Mutated Polio Virus Breaches Vaccine Protection

Thanks to effective vaccination, polio is nearly eradicated and only a few hundred people are stricken worldwide each year. But researchers in PNAS have reported alarming findings: a mutated virus was able to resist the vaccine protection to a considerabl ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 22 2014 - 5:23pm

Monkey Model For Severe MERS-CoV Disease May Lead To New Treatment

Researchers at the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases scientists have found that Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection in marmosets closely mimics the severe pneumonia experienced by people infected with ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 2:00pm

Allergic To Milk Or Lactose Intolerant? Here's Why

People allergic to milk often assume they have lactose intolerance, but they are actually different mechanisms that occur in different parts of the body.  People with lactose intolerance do not digest lactose properly because they lack an enzyme known as ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 22 2014 - 11:44am

Resilience Management: What The Bubonic Plague Can Teach Us About Ebola

In the 14th century, Venice was in many ways still a world power in its own right. The days when it could topple kingdoms using commerce were behind it, but it was still an important trade destination. In that period, trade meant ports and ports meant the ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 26 2014 - 3:38pm

Ionic Liquids: Busting Through Biofilm Shatters Defenses Of Serious Skin Infections

Biofilms are the first line of defense for harmful bacteria and make the treatment of skin infections especially difficult because microorganisms protected in a biofilm have antibiotic resistance and recalcitrance to treatment. Biofilm-protected bacteria ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 26 2014 - 5:17pm

New Antibody Shows Promise Against Sudan Strain Of Ebola

Researchers have developed a potential antibody therapy for Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV), one of the two most lethal strains of Ebola.  Sudan ebolavirus was first identified in 1976 and has caused numerous Ebola outbreaks (most recently in 2012) that have kill ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 30 2014 - 4:30am

MERS Has Low Transmissibility But It's Still Dangerous

The MERS coronavirus has caused disease outbreaks across the Arabian Peninsula and spread to Europe several times, claiming the lives of several hundred people since its discovery in 2012. How easily the pathogen spreads from human to human has remained a ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 30 2014 - 11:30am

Mutating Ebola Viruses Not As Scary As Evolving Ones

Scanning electron micrograph of Ebola virus budding from the surface of a Vero cell (African green monkey kidney epithelial cell line. Credit:NIAID By Rob Brooks My social media accounts today are cluttered with stories about “mutating” Ebola viruses. The ...

Article - The Conversation - Sep 2 2014 - 8:02am

Dengue Vaccine May Cause Short-Term Increase

Dengue is a serious illness diminished in importance in much of the developed world. Some efforts evolve around genetic modification while other efforts work on a vaccine. ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 5 2014 - 7:33pm