• Veterinary profession trends short-change biosecurity, food security, public health

    More than half of veterinary students in the United States seek training in companion animal or pet medicine – with fewer and fewer graduate veterinary students pursuing Ph.D. training which would prepare them for academic careers, key jobs in the public sector, and some positions in industry; the result is a dwindling supply of veterinarians to fill jobs overseeing and enforcing food safety and animal health standards, conduct research in human drug development and advances in pet health, and participate in wildlife and ecosystem management, infectious disease control, biosecurity, and agro-terrorism prevention

  • A 50-year cholera mystery solved

    For fifty years scientists have been unsure how the bacteria that gives humans cholera manages to resist one of our basic innate immune responses; that mystery has now been solved

  • Scientists show why swine flu virus develops drug resistance

    H1N1-2009 is a new, highly adaptive virus derived from different gene segments of swine, avian, and human influenza; within a few months of its appearance in early 2009, the H1N1-2009 strain caused the first flu pandemic of the twenty-first century

  • New approach to attacking flu virus

    Researchers demonstrate ways to use manufactured genes as antivirals, which disable key functions of the flu virus; the proteins have proven effective in attacking many pandemic influenza viruses, including several H1N1 (Spanish flu, Swine flu) and H5N1 (Avian flu) subtypes

  • Expanding the reach of an innovative virus-tracking software

    SUPRAMAP is a Web-based application which synthesizes large, diverse datasets so that researchers can better understand the spread of infectious diseases across hosts and geography; researchers have restructured this innovative tracking software to promote even wider use of the program around the world

  • Making food, water supply safe is a challenge for today's sensors

    Sensors that work flawlessly in laboratory settings may stumble when it comes to performing in real-world conditions; these shortcomings are important as they relate to safeguarding the U.S. food and water supplies

  • “Killer silk” kills anthrax and other microbes in minutes

    A simple, inexpensive dip-and-dry treatment can convert ordinary silk into a fabric that kills disease-causing bacteria — even the armor-coated spores of microbes like anthrax — in minutes

  • Less costly anti-malarial drug

    Malaria sickens 300-500 million people, and kills more than one million, annually; scientists are reporting development of a new, higher-yield, two-step, less costly process that may ease supply problems and zigzagging prices for the raw material essential for making the mainstay drug for malaria

  • The way one MARSA strain becomes resistant to antibiotic

    Researchers have uncovered what makes one particular strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) so proficient at picking up resistance genes, such as the one that makes it resistant to vancomycin, the last line of defense for hospital-acquired infections

  • Pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccination may lead to pan-influenza vaccine

    The pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccine can generate antibodies in vaccinated individuals not only against the H1N1 virus, but also against other influenza virus strains including H5N1 and H3N2; the discovery brings closer the day of a pan-influenza vaccine

  • Bacteria's strength in numbers challenged

    Scientists have opened the way for more accurate research into new ways to fight dangerous bacterial infections by proving a long-held theory about how bacteria communicate with each other

  • Researchers produce potential malarial vaccine from algae

    Malaria affects more than 225 million people worldwide in tropical and subtropical regions, resulting in fever, headaches, and in severe cases coma and death; researchers have succeeded in engineering algae to produce potential candidates for a vaccine that would prevent transmission of the parasite that causes malaria

  • Malaria detection model wins Georgia Tech Spring Design Expo

    Georgia Tech students design of a microfluidic cell sorter that aids in the detection of malaria; no current products exist that can be used for population screening at the desired sensitivity of buyers such as non-governmental organizations, while being both portable and non-electric

  • Congress considering biodefense measure

    H.R. 2356, the WMD Prevention and Preparedness Act of 2011, will soon be debated before four different House committees, before going to the Senate to be debated further – all this four years after a congressionally mandated commission defined bioterrorism as a grave threat to the United States; critics charge that the reason is the unwieldy and dysfunctional manner in which Congress oversees DHS: currently there are 108 congressional committees and subcommittees with oversight responsibilities for different parts of DHS

  • MRSA superbug spreads from big city hospitals to regional health centers

    MRSA — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — first started to appear around fifty years ago following the introduction of antibiotics, to which the bacteria has become increasingly resistant; scientists now find how the superbug spreads among different hospitals