Parents who decline to get their child vaccinated against the flu may be exposed to a limited range of information, a new national poll suggests. And depending on which sources parents turn to the most, inaccurate information may influence their decision about flu vaccine for their child.
Outbreaks of norovirus in health care settings and outbreaks caused by a particular genotype of the virus are most likely to make people seriously ill, according to a new study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Based on an analysis of nearly 3,800 US outbreaks from 2009 to 2016, the research confirms several factors that can make norovirus outbreaks more severe and may help guide efforts to develop a vaccine to prevent this highly contagious disease.
The global disease burden of meningitis remains unacceptably high, and progress lags substantially behind that of other vaccine-preventable diseases, warns a new analysis published in The Lancet Neurology.
The influenza virus can evolve resistance to an anti-flu drug currently in development for use in pandemics but only if there are multiple genetic mutations, a study has found. Scientists at Imperial College London, in collaboration with Public Health England, have discovered that two genetic mutations would be needed for the virus to develop resistance to favipiravir, an experimental antiviral developed in Japan.
The Australian Academy of Science is urging parents to vaccinate their children against all strains of meningococcal disease, after a recent spike in cases in Adelaide and the death of a seven-year-old boy in south-west Sydney.
Zika virus has been detected in dead monkeys found in Brazil near São José do Rio Preto, São Paulo State, and Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The animals had been shot or beaten to death by locals who thought they had yellow fever. In fact, the monkeys were bearers of Zika virus, which had made them sick and more vulnerable to attack by humans.
At room temperature, hepatitis B virus (HBV) remains contagious for several weeks and can even withstand temperatures of four degrees centigrade over the span of nine months. When applied properly, disinfectants are effective – but only undiluted. These are the results obtained by a German-Korean research team in a study using a novel HBV infection system in human liver cells.
InDevR announced that it will follow proof of concept development for new VaxArray potency assays for measles (M) and rubella vaccines sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The long-term objective is to create in vitro measles and rubella potency assays in order to deliver high-quality MR vaccines to market faster and with lower production costs. The project will leverage the multiplexed VaxArray platform, which was first developed and validated for more efficient potency testing of influenza vaccines.
Persuading more health workers across the continent to have the flu jab to protect themselves and their patients cannot be done through facts and statistics alone, new research by a leading behavioral scientist from Kingston University in London has revealed. Instead, it demands a new approach that connects with people emotionally to sustain immunization rates at effective levels.
Almost every child gets respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes cold-like symptoms. It's usually a big deal if they're healthy, but every year in the US some 57,000 children under the age of five are hospitalized with the infection. To make matters worse, there is no vaccine and sometimes used to prevent RSV in high-risk children is not always effective. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a promising method of delivering antibodies directly to the lungs, improving their effectiveness in warding off RSV.
Another flu season is here, which means another chance for viruses to mutate. Already, most influenza A viruses contain a mutation that confers resistance against one class of antiviral medications, and the bugs are steadily gaining resistance against another class. Scientists report in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters a series of experiments designed to develop new medications that could potentially fight off the resistant and sensitive types of influenza A.
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have engineered an antiviral peptide that exploits the Zika virus at its Achilles' heel – the viral membrane – hence stopping the virus from causing severe infections.