Immunology

"Chagas Disease: “The New HIV/AIDS of the Americas”" screams the headline of an editorial in the open access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, written primarily by two principal investigators of a vaccine against Chagas disease - and it has resounded with a thud among the actual people they think they are helping. “I think it’s an unfortunate comparison,” Rick Tarleton, a distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia studying Chagas disease and president of the Chagas Disease Foundation, told ABC News. “There are stigmas attached to HIV/AIDS that themselves are…

Garra rufa - "doctor fish' - are now trendy in some fish pedicure places.  The pedicuree dips their feet (see? I don't specify a gender or make any judgments, I am not Manny Pacquiao) into water containing the fish and the little critters exfoliate you by basically eating the dead skin from your toes. But that may not be the grossest thing about it. The grossest thing may be what the fish give back.  Writing in My Health News Daily, they note some reason for concern from an upcoming Emerging Infectious Diseases article about these fish and 'zoonotic disease pathogens of clinical…

Poor people in developing nations have been caught in a cultural tug-of-war over how to best keep them from dying of Malaria.  What they need to break the impasse between anti-science acolytes who think "Silent Spring" had any science in it and corporate chemical manufacturers is...a fashion show. Frederick Ochanda, postdoctoral associate in Cornell's Department of Fiber Science&Apparel Design and a native of Kenya, teamed up with Matilda Ceesay, a Cornell apparel design undergraduate from Gambia, to create a hooded bodysuit embedded at the molecular level with insecticides…

Integrated circuit techniques can do just about anything - perhaps even help cure sepsis. Margination is natural phenomenon where bacteria and leukocytes (white blood cells) move toward the sides of blood vessels. Now it's the inspiration for a novel method of treating sepsis, a systemic and often dangerous inflammatory response to microbial infection in the blood. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore have designed a branchlike system of microfluidic channels, 20 micrometers (about a fifth the size of a grain of sand) high by 20…

Researchers have discovered the probable cause of  several infectious agents at the same time. Paramyxoviruses originate from bats and from there the pathogens have spread to humans and other mammals. In total, the new study tested 9,278 animals for viruses, among them 86 species of bats and 33 rodent species, leading to the discovery of an enormous number of new virus species. This could make eradicating many dangerous diseases significantly more difficult than had been thought. For bats provide a reservoir from which viruses could come back after vaccination campaigns.  "We…

A protein found on the surface of immune cells called dendritic cells recognizes dangerous damage and trauma that could signify infection. Dendritic cells are critical for raising the alarm about the presence of foreign invaders in the body such as viruses, bacteria and parasites as well as tumor cells and other dead or damaged cells. Also known as antigen-presenting cells, they digest and present molecules from damaged cells to other immune cells that recognize foreign invaders and launch an immune response. This discovery of how a vital immune cell recognizes dead and damaged body cells…

I drank raw milk as a kid.  If you were poor and living in the country decades ago, when dairy farmers still had some measure of autonomy from government rules, you probably did too.   It didn't hurt me. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to drink it; now, instead of poor people in the country who didn't want to pay a lot for milk in a store because it was price controlled by the government, raw milk is a fad for the wealthy anti-vaccine crowd.  Claravale Farm of San Benito County, one of two raw milk dairies in the state of California, has been under quarantine because …

One strategy for tackling hard-to-treat bacterial infections could be viruses that can target and destroy bacteria. The development of such novel therapies is being accelerated in response to growing antibiotic resistance, says Dr David Harper at the Society for General Microbiology's Spring Conference in Dublin.Bacteriophages are viruses that can infect bacteria and multiply within them, breaking down the cell and destroying the bacteria - amplifying themselves in the process to deal with more bacteria. They are found everywhere including in river water, soil, sewage and on the human body.…

Primary Immune Deficiencies (PIDs) can be defined as defects in the immune system.  No, that can’t be enough. PIDs are defined as inherent defects in the immune system? Nope. Still not good enough. PIDs are defined as the susceptibility to rare pathogens? Not quite. Recurrent infections? Nope. We’ve known about PIDs atleast since the 1950s. We shed a tear at the John Travolta movie “The boy in the plastic bubble” (partly because of the movie but mostly because it had John Travolta). Indeed, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) as described in the movie is the most well known of the…

If you do not have your 11-year-old child in a car seat while driving and in a bicycle helmet while playing, you are putting them at severe risk.  We have to protect them.  Or not. While we expose kids to all kinds of harmful cultural stuff at earlier and earlier ages (sex, violence, political debates) we don't trust their physical competence or their judgment. Heck, the people behind the government health care plan think 25 should be the earliest age for adulthood. But as the pampered Generation X gave birth to their more pampered descendants, we discovered that a lot more kids…