MicrobeWorld

A new, large-scale clinical trial is examining whether antiretroviral medications normally used to treat HIV infection can also prevent HIV infection in women when applied as a vaginal gel or taken as oral tablets once daily.

The study, called Vaginal and Oral Interventions to Control the Epi... Read More

The novel antibiotic prulifloxacin effectively stopped traveler's diarrhea with once-daily dosing in the second phase III trial of the drug, researchers reported here.

A three-day course of the experimental fluoroquinolone reduced the duration of diarrhea compared with placebo (P Read More

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the long-awaited vaccines for the H1N1 "swine" flu virus this afternoon. It is expected to be available in a month at about 90,000 locations nationwide, the Associated Press reported.

"We will have enough vaccine available for everyone," Kathle... Read More

A tiny bacterium has been coaxed back to life after spending 120,000 years buried three kilometres deep in the Greenland ice sheet.

Officially named Herminiimonas glaciei, the bug consists of rods just 0.9 micrometres long and 0.4 micrometres in diameter, about 10 to 50 times smaller than the... Read More

An increasing number of ethanol companies are using hops to fight off nasty bacteria that can harm ethanol plant operations, according to Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul, Minn. Though antibiotics work well they have become a public relations problem as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sa... Read More

A Spanish study of ICU patients with H1N1, the largest ever conducted in Europe on influenza cases requiring intensive care, presented on the website of the medical journal ‘Critical Care,’ contradicts one of the messages on influenza A released by Spain's Ministry of Health and Department of He... Read More

There is mounting concern about whether humans have caught a strain of salmonella discovered in Tasmania's sparrow population which is experiencing a notable decline.

"Four cases of the salmonella in humans this year has Australian investigators wondering if there may be a link between a wide... Read More

The New Scientist reports that a "gold rush" to extract valuable methane from the depths of lake Kivu in Rwanda may trigger an outburst of gas that could wash a deadly, suffocating blanket over the 2 million people who live around the lake's shores.

"The lake, which is almost half a kilometre... Read More

In a study presented at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in San Francisco, University of Minnesota researchers found that students who receive an antiviral medication early in the course of the illness become less sick than those offered the standard a... Read More

USA Today reports two studies presented at ICAAC "by researchers in Canada and Singapore found that roughly one in five patients continue shedding the new H1N1 virus, or swine flu, with one study suggesting that patients may still shed virus despite treatment with Tamiflu.

The research sugges... Read More

A database designed to help researchers worldwide develop vaccines for avian and seasonal influenza viruses, not to mention the prolific H1N1 "swine flu," is now at the center of an ugly rift between its co-creators. Both the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) Foundation ... Read More

The New York Times reports that "a new study, published last week in the British journal Lancet, showed that invasive bacteria were an important cause of those children’s deaths and that many of the bacteria were the same kinds that affect children in wealthy countries, which have vaccines again... Read More

Norman R. Pace of the University of Colorado and colleagues have found that the morning shower is essentially a bath in bacteria.

"As part of a project to measure microbes in the indoor human environment, they looked at shower water, in part because in showers bacteria are incorporated into f... Read More

An article in the New York Times by Tara Parker-Pope analyzes several recent hand-washing studies and concludes that soap and water, or alcohol-based hand sanitizing gels, are your best bets to stave off the flu.

"It sounds so simple as to be innocuous, a throwaway line in public-health warni... Read More

Scientists at Oregon State University have developed a new "adjuvant" that could allow the creation of important new vaccines, possibly become a universal vaccine carrier and help medical experts tackle many diseases more effectively.

Adjuvants are substances that are not immunogenic themselv... Read More

A new study published in the September 15, 2009, issue of PLoS ONE found that patients with cavitary pulmonary tuberculosis receiving anti-TB medications supplemented with nebulized interferon-gamma have fewer bacilli in the lungs and less inflammation, thereby reducing the transmissibility of t... Read More

I have been using twitter (@Microblogology) as a way to keep in touch with some of my online friends for awhile now. Eventually my occasional tweets involving microbiology caused me to be "discovered" by Chris Condayan (@MicrobeWorld) and I was quickly followed by some other people in the scien... Read More

Click "source" to view the video. Read More

Space is not a fun place to get a stomach bug. To ensure drinking water is adequately disinfected, University of Utah chemists developed a two-minute water quality monitoring method that just started six months of tests aboard the International Space Station.

"Now they bring water back on the... Read More

"For more than 60 years, syphilis was largely on the decline. But in recent years, the venereal disease has been on the rise again — particularly in the post-recession South.

In Forsyth County, N.C., where the number of cases so far in 2009 — 140 — is more than triple all those reported in 20... Read More