Immunology

A type of immune antibody that can rapidly evolve to neutralize a wide array of influenza virus strains - including those the body hasn't yet encountered - suggests potential strategies for creating improved or even "universal" influenza vaccines. The novel infection-fighting protein, named 3I14 mAb, is a "broadly neutralizing antibody," so-called because it can recognize and disable a diverse group of the 18 different strains of influenza virus that circulate around the globe. According to the new report, the 3I14 antibody demonstrated it could neutralize the two main types of influenza A…

In 2012's "Science Left Behind" I noted something that was perfectly obvious to anyone who was not in a progressive ideological bunker - that while both the American left and right were each anti-science about some things, only the right wing got any science media attention about it. And that was despite the fact that the left's anti-science beliefs are far more dangerous. Global warming? Okay, in a hundred years it will be a problem. Skeptics are still conserving energy and recycling just as much as ardent believers right now.  Evolution? So what? If some crackpot school district tries…

Thanks to public shaming of wealthy progressive elites on the coast, and even pressuring the Governor of California to accept science the way he long claimed he does and ban the arbitrary exemptions that led to some schools with only 25 percent of kids - the ones with Republican parents - vaccinated, America's anti-vaccine movement is in decline. That leaves France, where over 40 percent of its citizens believe vaccines are unsafe, as the world leader of the anti-science movement in general, and vaccines in particular, show results published in EBioMedicine. A group of universities…

The human microbiota -- the entirety of bacteria which live e.g. on the skin or in the intestinal tract -- has an unknown influence on health. A team led by Prof. Tilo Biedermann, the director of the Clinic for Dermatology and Allergology at Rechts der Isar Hospital, examined the role microbiota plays in the digestive system in the case of food allergies and found that they may also play a role in determining the strength of anaphylactic reactions to food allergens.  The gut flora and the various elements of the immune system are closely interwoven and mutually influence each other…

If you recall dengue concerns in Florida in 2012...well, you probably don't. It never happened. Likewise with Ebola, SARS, Avian flu, you name it and it has been called an epidemic, and the NIH and the CDC have told Congress they need more money to fix it. Yet those epidemics never happened. Meanwhile, people sounding the alarm can rightly say that precaution is why the epidemics never happened. And dengue may be why Zika is underestimated, according to scholars at the São José do Rio Preto Medical School (FAMERP) in Brazil. The team, led by Maurício Lacerda Nogueira, a member…

A type of sugar found naturally in some women's breast milk may protect new born babies from infection with a potentially life threatening bacterium called Group B streptococcus. These bacteria are a common cause of meningitis in new borns and the leading cause of infection in the first three months of life in the UK and globally.  The small study involved 183 women in The Gambia and published in the journal Clinical and Translational Immunology, suggests a sugar found in some women's breast milk protect babies against the bacteria.  The bug is carried naturally in the vagina and…

Too much cholesterol used to be bad for you. Then some cholesterol was good for you. Now too little cholesterol is bad for you. A giant chunk of the public no longer trusts science, because scientists have not yet put epidemiology over with the social sciences and the humanities on the credibility scale. Using epidemiology, everything can both cause and prevent cancer. Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Washington University and the senior author of a paper the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, says that though high-density lipoprotein (HDL…

Blood stem cell transplantation, widely known as bone marrow transplantation, is a powerful technique that potentially can provide a lifelong cure for a variety of diseases. But the procedure is so toxic that it is currently used to treat only the most critical cases. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have come up with a way of conducting the therapy that, in mice, dramatically lowers its toxicity. If the method eventually proves safe and effective for humans, it potentially could be used to cure autoimmune diseases like lupus, juvenile diabetes and multiple…

WHAT: Vaccination against a single strain of Zika virus should be sufficient to protect against genetically diverse strains of the virus, according to a study conducted by investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Washington University in St. Louis; and Emory University in Atlanta. Zika virus strains are grouped into two distinct genetic lineages: African and Asian. The Zika virus strain circulating in the current outbreak affecting Central and South America and the Caribbean is of the Asian lineage…

How does Zika get transmitted? In America, it seems to be sex, but in South America it is mosquitoes? While all three vectors are ecologically useless - they could be blasted out of existence with no impact at all anywhere - it is helpful to know which ones are the real culprits. Researchers have now been able to directly connect the Aedes aegypti mosquito with Zika transmission in the Americas during an outbreak in southern Mexico.  In early 2015 the first Zika infections were described in Brazil, harbingers of an explosive hemispheric epidemic. As of July 2016, local Zika infections…