Infection Research
Online resource on infectious disease research, published by the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany.
17 June 2008
The Next Pandemic: Bird flu and the 1918 scourge yield harbingers of threats to come
In 1918, a flu virus swept across the world, killing 50 million or more people. Recently, a bird flu virus swept through domestic bird populations, and occasionally hopped from birds to people. The virus bears resemblance to the 1918 virus, so the bird flu outbreak raised fears of an imminent pandemic. Research over the last few years has provided some clues as to what the next pandemic flu virus might look like and how to prepare.
31 March 2008
Front Lines: Africa faces unique challenges in the fight against infectious diseases
Despite profound medical advances over the last century, infectious diseases still present a serious threat to world health. And though many regions are hard-hit, perhaps no part of the world faces as extreme challenges as Africa does. Ongoing fights against HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, coupled with changing demographics, modernizing cities, and bloody conflicts, present a difficult road ahead for African nations to keep people healthy.
01 February 2008
Coming to a Boil: Climate change encourages the expansion of infectious disease
Will there be a triumphant progress of infection diseases while heating up our climate?
“Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces for they are not at all alike, but differ much from themselves in regard to their changes. Then the winds, the hot and the cold, especially such as are common to all countries, and then such as are peculiar to each locality. We must also consider the qualities of the waters, for as they differ from one another in taste and weight, so also do they differ much in their qualities.” So wrote the Greek physician Hippocrates in 400 BC, imploring physicians to heed the effects of weather and climate on disease. Now, as global climate change threatens to alter life as we know it, the effect of climate on health, including infectious diseases, returns to the fore.
10 December 2007
Vaccine Development: Promise and Peril
High hopes and deap disappointments go along with vaccine development
Vaccines have suppressed many scourges over the last two centuries and new vaccines could aid the fight against numerous current health threats. Yet, counterbalancing successful vaccine development are expectations and disappointments.
09 October 2007
A shifting threat
Development of antibiotic resistance and spread outside of hospitals weighs on researchers’ efforts to tame Staphylococcus
Otherwise-healthy children die of unusual infections. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread through sports teams. And the last line drug loses effectiveness. The threat of Staphylococcus to human health continues, and presents new challenges for doctors and scientists. Researchers are delving into developing new antibiotics, understanding why staph infections aren’t restricted to hospitals anymore, and figuring out how the bug evades the host immune system.
01 September 2007
A new century of new challenges
Infection Research faces new threats
Infection research is experiencing something of a rebirth. The century-long decline in rates of infectious diseases has flattened out and in some cases risen over the last two decades. Many diseases that were once well-controlled have remounted their attack, and a host of new sicknesses have come to the fore. In addition, the body of scientific data has provided a crystal ball through which scientists conjure future diseases - though researchers don't when or if these new scourges will appear and how devastating they will be.