Immunology

A team of scientists led by chemist and Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Pioneer laureate Piet Gros and medical microbiologist Jos van Strijp from Utrecht University have succeeded in 'freezing' a chain reaction of the immune system and they're calling it a breakthrough in the field of immunology. One of the oldest defense mechanisms of our body is the complement system. Unlike white blood cells, which must learn to recognize pathogens, the complement system works from birth onwards. The system consists of proteins that initiate a chain reaction to kill bacteria and…

In England and Wales, the national health statistics in 2007 showed that there were 8,324 death certificates which named Clostridium difficile. This is a bacterium which causes severe diarrhea in humans and animals as the underlying cause of death, a 28% increase from 2006. Now Janet Nale of the Department of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation is investigating the contributing factors that make Clostridium difficile so aggressive to direct treatment.  Nale said: “Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria and some can completely change the behaviour of their host bacteria, or…

One odd characteristic of H1N1 influenza A (swine flu) in 2009 is that it seems to hit children much harder than the elderly, an about-face from ordinary flu.   So targeting children may be an effective use of limited supplies of flu vaccine, according to research at the University of Warwick funded by the Wellcome Trust and the EU. The study suggests that, used to support other control measures, this could help control the spread of pandemics such as the current swine flu. As the World Health Organization declares a pandemic global H1N1 swine flu, countries are looking at measures to…

Fire drills are conducted to know what it will be like in an actual fire incident. The main objective of fire drills are to asses how fast can people evacuate the buildings safely, if ever they catch fire. I think the swine flu virus is just like that. It is not as deadly as the Ebola Zaire, which are known cause 90% fatalities, nor as resilient as HIV, but the fact that it is a flu virus makes it as valuable as a fire drill - a life saving drill . We now know how fast a flu or at least a flu-like virus can be transmitted. In Canada earlier this month, 265 cases have been reported in just 72…

Are parasites evolving to be more or less aggressive depending on whether they are closely connected to their hosts or scattered among more isolated clusters of hosts?  Research led by Geoff Wild, an NSERC-funded mathematician at the University of Western Ontario, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh. They decided to move the arguments from words to harder science and developed a formal mathematical model that incorporated variable patch sizes and the host parasite population dynamics. It was then run to determine the underlying evolutionary mechanisms.  "Our study…

The secret to any good recipe is knowing how things happen in a system and the recipe for diseases is no different.  Many diseases have crucial proteins which change the dynamics of cells from benign to deadly. New findings from an international collaboration involving McGill University, the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and the Human Proteome Organisation (HUPO) just made identifying these changes one step easier. Their findings published in Nature Methods, show how to improve protein analysis to tease out relevant potential disease-causing molecules…

Since April 15 and 17, 2009, when the first two cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) infection were identified from two southern California counties, novel influenza A (H1N1) cases have been documented throughout the world, with most cases occurring in the United States and Mexico. In the United States, early reports of illnesses associated with novel influenza A (H1N1) infection indicated the disease might be similar in severity to seasonal influenza, with the majority of patients not requiring hospitalization and only rare deaths reported, generally in persons with underlying medical…

Avian influenza viruses do not thrive in humans because the temperature inside a person's nose is too low, according to research published today in PLoS Pathogens. The authors of the study, from Imperial College London and the University of North Carolina, say this may be one of the reasons why bird flu viruses do not cause pandemics in humans easily. There are 16 subtypes of avian influenza and some can mutate into forms that can infect humans, by swapping proteins on their surface with proteins from human influenza viruses. Today's study shows that normal avian influenza viruses do not…

Recently I had the opportunity to ask Paul Ewald, one of the nation's leading evolutionary biologists, about a subject near and dear to his heart: the evolution of a bug, specifically swine flu. As usual, Ewald, a professor of biology at the University of Louisville, was lucid, cogent and memorable. In his 2002 book, Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease, Ewald set the bio-med community on its head by arguing that most chronic disease is caused by sub-acute levels of pathogenic origin, rather than genes. His thesis has since generated enormous interest and a growing following in…

The death toll due to malaria outbreaks has reached over million lives every year with an additional 300-500 million people suffering illness from serious malaria infections. The growing pandemic and high mortality rate has caused renewed and fervent interest in creating an effective vaccine treatment for the prevention of malaria. This interest has sparked physicians, scientists and pharmaceutical companies alike to race for the most cost-effective, efficient and overall viable vaccine against malaria.  There are currently multiple vaccines in various stages of trial and with various…