Immunology

Despite two generations of prevention, awareness and treatment, gay and bisexual continue to have high levels of HIV infection, a new study led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows.  HIV is highly treatable now, something only imagined in the early 1980s when it first came to prominence. Critics of the time contended it was more of a lifestyle disease, like obesity, and decades later they seem to be right, even if they contended it for the wrong reasons. In the past, it was assumed prevention was the best thing, and then treatment for cases like rape or mother-…

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) develops through chromosomal alterations in blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and usually occurs in older persons. Around 20 percent of adults diagnosed with leukemia suffer from this type of blood cancer. The protein Gab2 works as an enhancer of cancer-causing signals and is often present in larger quantities in CML cells than in healthy cells. In two studies, Freiburg researchers have made new discoveries concerning the relationship between CML and Gab2 and drugs that can break a particular resistance to Gab2 in CML cells. The team,  including Dr.…

Celiac disease is a rare immune-based condition brought on by the consumption of gluten in genetically susceptible patients. In recent years a larger number of people have stated they are gluten sensitive or even celiac despite lack of a diagnosis, and many dismissed that as the nocebo effect - people who give up something harmless and feel better, the opposite of people who take something harmless and feel better, a placebo. They argued that people who were embracing it because of pop culture books on wheat. A new study opens up the possibility that celiac disease is an umbrella for…

It's no surprise that the rise of peanut allergies correlates to the rise in helicopter parenting. Where kids once built up immunity by getting dirty and eating the foods their parents, a subset of modern parents schedule play dates, buy antibacterial soap and believe that breast milk has "otherworldly power." Though the Centers for Disease Control is still shoring up some long-debunked beliefs, like that salt causes heart disease and that creating an arbitrary marker and calling it prediabetes will be clinically relevant for diabetes, other parts of the federal government are a little more…

If we want to cut down on antibacterial resistance, we should certainly stop buying that stupid hand soap, but we should also stop doing symptom-based medicine when it comes to sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs), which the regular medical community abandoned years ago. Leave that kind of 'act first, think later' approach to homeopaths, naturopaths and chiropractors. If we did, 75 percent of emergency department patients with symptoms of gonorrhea or chlamydia would not just be handed antibiotics only to test negative.   Researchers from St. John Hospital&Medical Center in Detroit,…

A few years ago, there were concerns about Dengue in Florida. This plight on humanity is carried by a small number of mosquitoes that have no ecological value of any kind, they are just disease carriers that have somehow survived evolution.  Pesticides obviously work, DDT has been killing the bugs that carry malaria for 70 years, but a more targeted approach is making sure they can't viably reproduce - a genetically modified mosquito does that quite well, but an activist mom, funded by environmentalists, whipped the public into frenzy. Science rationally showed that the arguments were…

Gay men who live outside major Canadian cities are less likely to get an HIV test than their metropolitan counterparts, according to a survey which also finds that the lower testing rates are likely connected to internalized feelings of homophobia and a reluctance to disclose sexual preferences at a doctor's office.  The team surveyed 153 people recruited through online dating sites and events in the gay community. The results were that 24 percent of men living in smaller communities had never had an HIV test, compared to the 14 to 17 percent of untested men living in large cities such…

Some broad-spectrum antibiotics that disrupt the gut microbiome may raise the risk of complications from stem cell transplantation, according to a new study evaluating data from more than 850 transplant patients, as well as from mice. The findings suggest that selecting antibiotics that spare "good" bacteria may help protect against graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), which occurs when transplanted donor cells, recognizing their new home as foreign, attack the recipient's body. Transplant patients vulnerable to life-threatening bacterial infections are often treated with broad-spectrum…

A new study presented today demonstrates the potential challenge posed to public health systems across Europe as a result of the prevalence of Hepatitis B among new refugee populations.  With nearly 1,000,000 asylum applications lodged in Germany alone last year, the European Union (EU) is experiencing an unprecedented wave of immigration by refugees and asylum seekers. With many coming from the mid-east, health authorities in the EU face serious challenges in responding to the spread of communicable diseases among both refugee and native populations.  A recent study was conducted…

The World Health Organisation has declared the yellow fever outbreak in Angola a grade 2 emergency.This means that it can have moderate public health consequences. This requires an emergency support team run from the organizations regional office providing support. Health and medicine editor Candice Bailey spoke to Jacqueline Weyer, a senior medical scientist from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, to understand the latest outbreak. How serious is the outbreak in Angola? When last did this happen? The outbreak started in December 2015 in the country’s capital…