Norwalk virus, a gut-wrenching fixture of Canadian winters whose source and seasonal nature have long been a mystery, may originate in drinking water drawn from lakes whose cool winter temperatures keep the microbe nicely preserved, suggests a new study.
University of Toronto researchers, co... Read More
Swine flu may have infected at least 63 million people in the U.S. last year, according to a study in Pittsburgh, where almost every second schoolchild probably caught the pandemic virus.
Blood tests on Pittsburgh residents found 45 percent of people aged 10 to 19 years had antibodies against... Read More
Flightless birds, blind cave shrimp, and other oddities suggest a "use it or lose it" tendency in evolution. In the microbial world, an unusual marine microorganism appears to have ditched several major metabolic pathways, leaving it with a remarkably reduced set of genes.
This metabolic mini... Read More
Australian and American scientists have found evidence that human Chlamydia pneumoniae was originally derived from an animal source
Animals have been found to have infected humans sometime in the past with the common respiratory disease Chlamydia pneumoniae, according to Queensland Univer... Read More
This new 2010 paper from the Journal of Environmental Quality takes a closer look at the presence of a pathogenic amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, in drinking water from various wells and at different times of year from the Phoenix, Arizona area. It was previously determined that the contamination of ... Read More
Markus Covert is close to completing a computer model of the microbe Mycoplasma genitalia, a sexually-trasnmitted parasite. The bug is ideal for virtual re-creation because of its simplicity: only 521 coding regions.
In a purely logistical sense, biology can really get in the way of biologica... Read More
World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines for preventing the spread of tuberculosis through air travel are largely a waste of time and resources, an expert said.
The WHO recommendations, set down in 2006 and 2008, urge health watchdogs to trace and screen passengers who have sat for longer t... Read More
So-called 'cryptic' bacterial genes that preside over the production of medically important compounds can be switched on using environmental triggers, German scientists have shown. The researchers used soil extracts to persuade a Clostridium species to produce a hitherto unknown antibiotic that... Read More
Broad spectrum antibiotics are available that act against a wide range of bacteria, including both gram-positive and gram-negative species. In contrast, our antiviral arsenal is exceedingly specific. Nearly all the known antivirals block infection with one or two different viruses. The discovery... Read More
On episode #70 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent, Dickson, and Alan consider a broad spectrum antiviral against enveloped viruses, how a plant virus induces chemical signals in the host ... Read More
Vaccination programs against whooping cough may not be fully effective because the bacteria that cause the disease have evolved new strains, a University of New South Wales study has found.
A team of Australian scientists has shown for the first time that two of the most common strains of the... Read More
The FDA announced yesterday a recall by Queseria Bendita of certain cheese products due to fears that the products are contaminated by Listeria monocytogenes. The potentially lethal bacteria has been found at the Queseria Bendita facility and in samples of unopened, recalled product.
Queseri... Read More
Well before she became pregnant, Yulisdey Lopez already knew that gum disease could cause a baby to be born prematurely. As part of her introduction to On-Site Dentistry, where she has long received her dental care, she said dentists and hygienists explained the importance of oral hygiene, citin... Read More
Genome analysis of an important microbe sheds light on the unexplained puzzle of how oceans maintain a healthy balance of nutrients, say scientists at UC Santa Cruz.
While Jonathan Zehr, a marine microbiologist at UCSC, discovered the microbe in 1998 near Hawaii, the tiny organism has proved ... Read More
Rockefeller University's Jean Laurent Casanova spoke on the connection between genetics and infectious diseases at the 2010 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on Friday, February 19, focusing on current findings and putting them in context in this... Read More
Such is the scenario recently presented to a national sample of Americans by Harvard University researchers ....
First, respondents were told to imagine that some residents of their town had become ill from what was believed to be inhalation anthrax, that some had died, and that many more lik... Read More
Research by scientists at the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry suggests that buffer strips of grasses and other plants can trap and break down veterinary antibiotics in manure fertilizers.
Buffer strips have already demonstrated that they can be effective in protecting water qua... Read More
How many of you run into problems of false- positive PCR or lack of sensitivity in qPCR when trying to use 16S primers because of the background genomic DNA in your PCR enzyme mixes? At MO BIO Labs, we do.
This article is a review of a new paper in the Journal of Microbiological Methods (Novem... Read More
A common bacteria found in many healthy adult females that can cause life-threatening infections when passed to newborns could be introduced to some women through frequent contact with cows, according to a research team led by a Michigan State University pediatrician.
The recently published f... Read More
Nestle chocolate morsels made in Wisconsin have tested positive for salmonella, according to a company spokeswoman.
This news follows a statement from the company in January that it again found a potentially fatal bacteria in its Toll House cookie dough.
There was no outbreak -- or recall ... Read More