Health and Medicine

Research community questioning legitimacy of Canadian drug approved for market in Africa

With one million deaths and 300 million new cases of malaria each year, the quest for a successful malaria treatment is urgent. But one new drug, touted by its manufacturer as safe and exceptionally effective, and already approved for sale by five African nations, is provoking suspicion in the malaria research community. At best, some researchers claim, the Canadian drug Malarex has not been ade

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other institutions report that satellite imagery could be used to determine areas at high-risk for exposure to Sin Nombre virus (SNV), a rodent-born disease that causes the often fatal hantaviral pulmonary syndrome (HPS) in humans. According to the researchers, satellite imaging detects the distinct environmental conditions that may serve as a refuge for the disease-carrying deer mice. Higher populations of infected deer mice in

In a groundbreaking study, a North Carolina State University microbiologist has discovered that the bacteria associated with almost all human ulcers – one that is also correlated with the development of certain types of gastric cancer in humans – uses hydrogen as an energy source.

The finding is novel because most bacteria use sugars and other carbohydrates to grow, says Dr. Jonathan Olson, assistant professor of microbiology at NC State. The human pathogen Helicobacter pylori does not.

Cytomegalovirus, hidden in most people, begins to give up secrets of its stealth

Princeton scientists have taken an important step toward understanding a virus that infects and lies dormant in most people, but emerges as a serious illness in transplant patients, some newborns and other people with weakened immune systems.

The virus, called human cytomegalovirus, enters the bone marrow and can hide there for a lifetime. Until now, however, scientists had not been able to stud

A revolutionary new test for identifying people infected with tuberculosis (TB), one of the leading causes of death worldwide, will shortly be launched by Oxford Immunotec Ltd, a new Oxford University spin-off company. The test radically improves the speed and accuracy with which the disease can be identified. It has been developed to replace the existing skin test for TB, which is given to 600,000 UK schoolchildren every year.

Oxford Immunotec’s test has come from discoveries made over

Falling asleep is usually thought of as something we can control ourselves as part of our behaviour patterns. In a new article in the December Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Bidi Evans argues that waking and sleeping is actually controlled by a physical mechanism that is ‘hard-wired’ into the brain. She suggests that evidence from people with brain damage shows that coma patients literally cannot wake up, because their waking mechanism is ‘broken’. Dr Evans recommends that sleep medicin