• Scientists: Global pandemic of fake, sub-standard medicines poses dire risk

    Poor quality medicines are a real and urgent threat that could undermine decades of successful efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, according to the editors of a collection of journal articles published yesterday. Scientists report up to 41 percent of specimens failed to meet quality standards in global studies of about 17,000 drug samples. Among the collection is an article describing the discovery of falsified and substandard malaria drugs that caused an estimated 122,350 deaths in African children in 2013. Other studies identified poor quality antibiotics, which may harm health and increase antimicrobial resistance.

  • Water shortage grows, and so does the need for technological solutions

    The value of freshwater is becoming more apparent, as more and more areas around the world are suffering from dwindling supply as a result of climate change. The World Bank estimates that water is $1 trillion privatized commodity. Last week, California imposed mandatory restrictions on water use for the first time in its history. California’s unprecedented move is just one example of the political and social issues which will accompany a growing water shortage moving forward.

  • Epidemiologist warns Maine is unprepared to deal with disease outbreaks

    Last year, when Kaci Hickox, a nurse who returned to her home state of Maine from West Africa, she was quarantined despite showing no signs of the disease. The way she was treated led the CDC to warn that in the absence of detailed preparations, public hysteria and paranoia often accompany, and complicate response to, an outbreak. Since then, Maine officials have been debating whether or not state agencies are prepared to tackle an outbreak.

     

  • U.S. training foreign health personnel to tackle future epidemics in North Africa, Middle East

    In an effort to prevent an Ebola-like disease outbreak in North Africa and the Middle East, a U.S. science envoy is leading a government-sponsored program which would train foreign health experts on how to produce vaccines in time to prevent an epidemic. It is uncertain what disease threat might emerge in North Africa and the Middle East, so the scientists want to be prepared for a number of candidates. They worrys most about leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, MERS, dengue fever, and alkhurma hemorrhagic fever, diseases for which there are no licensed vaccines; and tuberculosis, for which the only vaccine, BCG, offers at best modest protection.

  • Researchers develop Ebola vaccine effective in a single dose

    During 2014, the outbreak of the West African Makona strain of Ebola Zaire virus killed nearly 10,000 and caused worldwide concern. With increasing population growth in West Africa, the frequency of contact between humans and natural Ebola virus hosts such as bats will likely rise, potentially leading to more catastrophic outbreaks. Researchers have developed a quick-acting vaccine that is both safe and effective with a single dose against the Ebola strain that killed thousands of people in West Africa last year.

  • A durable vaccine for Ebola

    African apes serve as a main source of ebolavirus transmission into the human population. As a consequence, the prevention of ebolavirus infection in African apes could reduce the incidence of future human ebolavirus outbreaks. A new study shows the durability of a novel “disseminating” cytomegalovirus (CMV)-based Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus; EBOV) vaccine strategy that may eventually have the potential to reduce ebolavirus infection in wild African ape species. The innovative approach may overcome the major hurdle to achieving high vaccine coverage of these animals. They live in of some of the most remote, inaccessible regions of the world which makes conventional, individual vaccination near impossible.

  • Implementing new food safety measure hampered by lack of funding

    Roughly forty-eight million Americans have food-borne illness each year, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 128,000 of them are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. The cost of treatment and lost income is $15 billion a year or more, according to data from the Agriculture Department.When Congress passed the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new powers to prevent food outbreaks, however, it failed adequately to fund the agency, thereby diminishing its ability to implement new regulations and inspection powers on food producers and foreign suppliers.

  • Predictions of Ebola outbreak overstated by faulty modeling

    Frequently used approaches to understanding and forecasting emerging epidemics — including the West African Ebola outbreak — can lead to big errors that mask their own presence, according to a new study. “In the early days of the Ebola outbreak, a lot of people got into the forecasting business. They did it using appealingly simple mathematical models, and the result was a series of warnings that alerted the world, quite rightly, to the seriousness of the situation,” says one of the researchers. “But in the end, most of those predictions turned out to be overstated.”

  • Food safety specialists hope new tracking approach will lead to better intervention

    Estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show these four pathogens cause 1.9 million cases of foodborne illness in the United States each year. A new partnership to improve food safety and better track foodborne illness is an approach that food safety specialists say will lead to better intervention strategies.

  • Greater variety of U.S. flu strains alarming, but may not be new

    New virus strains found throughout the central United States have alarmed health specialists, including officials at the CDC, but other experts say that what appears to be an increase in the number of strains is merely the consequences of improved diagnosis technologies.As an expanding human population moves closer to animal habitats, the number of viruses that people come into contact with may also increase. “By extending our range, we encounter viruses we wouldn’t have otherwise,” says one expert. “It’s the nature of the world we live in now. It’s how it is, unfortunately.”

  • K-State animal health expert selected to lead NBAF strategic partnership effort

    The Department of Homeland Security has selected Marty Vanier, the K-State’s director of operations at the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center, to be the senior program manager for strategic partnership development at the National Bio and Agro-defense Facility, or NBAF. Vanier will start her new responsibilities with the DHS Science and Technology Directorate this month. Construction on the $1.25 billion animal disease research laboratory will begin in May and is expected to be completed in 2020. The lab is on the northeast edge of Kansas State University’s Manhattan campus.

  • Increasing use of antibiotics in livestock undermines effectiveness of antimicrobials in humans

    Antibiotic consumption in livestock worldwide could rise by 67 percent between 2010 and 2030, and possibly endanger the effectiveness of antimicrobials in humans, according to researchers. Five countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — will experience a growth of 99 percent in antibiotic consumption, compared with an expected 13 percent growth in their human populations over the same period. In the United States, antibiotic consumption in animals currently represents up to 80 percent of total antimicrobial sales. “The discovery and development of antibiotics was a major public health revolution of the twentieth century,” says one of the researchers. “Their effectiveness — and the lives of millions of people around the world — are now in danger due to the increasing global problem of antibiotic resistance, which is being driven by antibiotic consumption.”

  • New detection method for bacterial toxin

    The Bacillus cereus bacterium is one of the potential causes of food poisoning. A recent study in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry shows that this versatile pathogen produces nineteen different variants of a poison that causes nausea and vomiting in human beings. This variety could explain why some cases are relatively benign and others can result in death. Across Europe, the number of food poisoning cases caused by the Bacillus species is on the rise.

  • Identifying infectious diseases at the point-of-care

    A major problem with current testing for infectious diseases in Africa is that it focuses on individual diseases and cannot reliably discriminate among them. Since most infectious diseases have the same feverish symptoms, diagnosis is often inaccurate, resulting in thousands of deaths and increased resistance to antimicrobial drugs. A new “lab-on-a-disc” technology developed by an EU project research team can diagnose malaria and other febrile infectious diseases simultaneously in just an hour — allowing faster point-of-care treatment and precise drugs administration that could save thousands of lives.

  • Bioweapons do not offer the same deterrence value nukes offer: Experts

    Biological and nuclear weapons are both considered weapons of mass destruction, but only nuclear weapons currently serve as a deterrence. Some security experts have proposed the idea of nations adopting non-contagious biological weapons as a new form of deterrence. Critics note that the consequences of starting a global biological arms race are troubling enough, but the concept of replacing nuclear weapons with biological weapons as a form of deterrence is flawed for three main reasons: uncertainty of effects, availability of defenses, and the need for secrecy and surprise.