Living longer and better medical treatments such as organ transplants and cancer therapy are all paradoxically increasing our risk of blood poisoning, according to experts in bacterial infections speaking at the Society for General Microbiology’s Spring Meeting in Edinburgh today, Monday 7 April 2003.

“The two commonest causes of blood poisoning are bacteria called Escherichia coli from the urinary tract, and Staphylococcus aureus carried on the skin or from a hospital drip,” says Professor

Using cold temperatures could help make quicker, cheaper and safer influenza vaccines, according to Dr Alison Whiteley at the Society for General Microbiology’s Spring Meeting in Edinburgh today, Monday 7 April 2003.

Influenza epidemics sweep the world every year killing the very young and the very old, but every thirty years or so a new virulent strain appears which kills people from every age group. These super-dangerous strains develop from viruses which normally infect birds, and the vac

Huge pulsed power machine enters fusion arena

Throwing its hat into the ring of machines that offer the possibility of achieving controlled nuclear fusion, Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine has created a hot dense plasma that produces thermonuclear neutrons, Sandia researchers announced today at a news conference at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia.

The neutrons emanate from fusion reactions within a BB-sized deuterium capsule pla

USC researchers uncover mechanism of class- switching in antibodies

A team of scientists from the Keck School of Medicine of USC has, for the first time, described a new, stable DNA structure in both mouse and human cells-one which differs from the standard Watson-and-Crick double helix and plays a critical role in the production of antibodies, or immunoglobulins.
The research will be published online in the journal Nature Immunology this week, and will appear in print in the jou

Logging, illegal hunting, and Ebola caused nearly 60 percent decline since 1983

Scientists say chimps and gorillas now ’critically endangered’

Scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, Princeton University and other organizations have reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature that a dramatic decline of gorillas and chimpanzees is taking place in western equatorial Africa, the last stronghold for great apes on the continent. Ravaged

May lead to sharper picture of human genome as well

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists have used a powerful gene-mapping technique to produce the clearest picture yet of all the genes of an animal – the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans (better known as C. elegans). Scientists believe the same technique may be used to bring the current, somewhat blurry picture of the human genome into sharper focus.

The study, which will be posted on the Nature Genetics website (