A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan has provided surprising findings indicating that hospital-onset Clostridioides difficile, or C. diff, infections may come from characteristics associated with the patients themselves and not via hospital transmission. The findings, reported today in Nature Medicine, could help support additional steps needed…

Research conducted by the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine, has revealed that the gut microbiome can have a significant impact on the acquisition of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV) infections as well as on the course of the disease. Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, scientists…

U.S. research has shown that the susceptibility of the gut pathogen Clostridioides difficile to antibiotics is affected by other bacteria, suggesting that the entire microbiome should be considered when designing eradication treatments. The presence of other microbes that were more susceptible to low antibiotic concentrations led to increasing numbers of C.…

Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) have identified a compound that prevents gastrointestinal infections from multiple strains of Chlostridiodes difficile (C. diff)—including those that can cause serious illness—and are now using the compound to develop drugs that could eventually prevent serious C. diff infections. “C. diff infection…

Non-tuberculous Mycobacterium (NTM) infections, particularly Mycobacterium abscessus, are increasingly common among patients with cystic fibrosis and chronic bronchiectatic lung diseases. Antibiotic resistance poses a challenge to treatment Mycobacterium infections. Now, researchers led by the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California San Diego reported 20 new case studies on…

Another piece of the puzzle explaining why some people who contract COVID-19 have milder symptoms than others may have been uncovered by researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The new study, published in Science Immunology, suggests that people with COVID-19 may experience milder symptoms because CD8+ T cells “remember” previous encounters…

Scientists headed by a team at the University of Chicago have shown how genetic differences in the immune system can impact on the types of bacterial communities that colonize the gastrointestinal system. Their studies, in germ-free mice colonized with microbiomes from conventionally reared animals, found that while the makeup of…

North Carolina State University scientists using a mouse model found that antibiotic use creates a veritable “banquet” for Clostridium difficile (C. diff) by altering the native gut bacteria that would normally compete with C. diff for nutrients. The findings (“Shifts in the Gut Metabolome and Clostridium difficile Transcriptome throughout Colonization and Infection in a Mouse Model”), published in…

In a new study lead by scientists at the University of Minnesota and Nantes University Hospital in France, researchers showed that the bacteria in a patient’s gut might predict their risk for life-threatening blood infections following high-dose chemotherapy. Approximately 20,000 cancer patients receive high-dose chemotherapy each year in preparation for…

The devastating impact that infectious diseases can have on the global population was well demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, pandemics remain unusual occurrences, but research suggests that factors such as climate change may be increasing the risk of such events occurring in the future. Jan…

Researchers in Germany report they have found islands of highly potent immune cells in the bone marrow of the skull neighboring glioblastoma, a surprising discovery that provides a prospective new avenue for the development of therapies to fight the most common form of brain cancer. Until now, the common notion…

A new study of more than 4,700 people from the Collaborative Cohort of Cohorts for COVID-19 Research (C4R) reveals that more than one in five people who contracted COVID from 2020 to 2023 did not recover within 90 days after infection. The study also revealed that those people who had…

Over the last thirty years, protein-based injections and DNA therapeutics accounted for the majority of newly introduced treatments. However, these medicines remain out of reach for many around the world due to high pricing, with some therapies ranging from thousands to several millions of dollars to purchase. [caption id=”attachment_147257″ align=”alignright”…

The results of two back-to-back randomized double-blind placebo controlled trials has shown that a 100-year-old vaccine originally developed to prevent tuberculosis helps protect people with type 1 diabetes from COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The research by investigators at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)…

Gigi Chambers has had a lot to contend with as a patient—she’s beaten cancer twice, including stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and then twenty years later was diagnosed with heart failure and received a transplant. But nothing has been more dreadful and uncomfortable than the post-transplant heart biopsies checking for graft…