MicrobeWorld

Group A Streptococcus (GAS) is responsible for infections ranging from “strep throat” to necrotizing fasciitis, aka the “flesh-eating disease”, a severe and invasive condition that has seen a marked increase in incidence in the past 30 years. The increase has been pinned on a single clone of th... Read More

An antibacterial enzyme found in human tears and other body fluids could be applied to certain foods for protection against intentional contamination with anthrax, scientists reported in Boston, Massachusetts on August 26 at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

"... Read More

Italian researchers offer some hopeful news for parents of colicky babies: a daily dose of "good" bacteria may help their child to cry less.

After three weeks of treatment with probiotic bacteria, babies cried for an average of about a half-hour a day, while infants who received a placebo wer... Read More

Two New York lawmakers want farmers to vaccinate their chickens against salmonella, The Associated Press reported.

Sen. Daniel Squadron and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh announced their proposal in response to the nationwide recall of more than half a billion eggs linked to nearly 1,500 cases of... Read More

The brain can be a convenient hiding place for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

That's the finding of Swedish researchers who analyzed samples from about 70 HIV-infected patients who'd been taking anti-HIV drugs. The tests showed that about 10 percent of the patients -- a larger proportion th... Read More

Kissing a frog won't turn it into a prince - except in fairy tales - but frog's skin can actually provide a 'kiss of death' for antibiotic-resistant germs.

Scientists have claimed that frog skin contains natural substances that could be the basis for a powerful new genre of antibiotics.

I... Read More

As efforts continue to clean the oil that gushed from the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of scientists has found that nature's microbial helpers are hard at work too — and doing a better job than researchers had expected.

Data collected in May and June showed populations of carb... Read More

In order to minimize the risk of infection in mothers, women giving birth to babies by caesarean section should routinely receive antibiotics an hour before the surgery, according to a new recommendation issued Monday by a national doctor group.

Currently, women who undergo caesareans often r... Read More

You can "check in" to restaurants and bars, so how about health clinics while you get tested for sexually transmitted diseases?

Foursquare, the online application people use to tell their friends and strangers where they are, is offering a special virtual "badge" through September to people w... Read More

It never occurred to me that the human body and a coral reef have a lot in common--until I spoke to Forest Rohwer for ... Read More

Researchers have linked a second type of mouse virus to a baffling condition called chronic fatigue syndrome, but said their findings do not yet prove that any virus causes the symptoms.

They found evidence of murine leukemia virus, which causes cancer in mice, in 86 percent of chronic fatigu... Read More

We tend to think of bacteria as engaging in chemical warfare only when they attack us, wreaking havoc on our cells. But the microbiome is a vicious place, with many species hurling toxins at each other, attempting to gain a competitive advantage. A bacterium called Bacillus subtilis goes beyond... Read More

They say Ponce de Leon looked for the Fountain of Youth in Florida, but he might have saved himself some trouble by looking a bit closer to home. A study just released by mBio links an enzyme present in almost all organisms to the reduction of age-related products called Amadori-modified protei... Read More

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty would be better off drinking from a dog bowl than the water cooler he shares with his colleagues at Queen’s Park, a Toronto Star investigation reveals.

The Star collected and analyzed bacteria samples swabbed from spouts of 20 public water fountains and free-st... Read More

A drug to treat the deadly Ebola virus is one step closer today, after a new treatment was used to save infected monkeys. Clinical trials have now been approved on a small group of human volunteers in the U.S. Ebola causes death in 90 per cent of human cases but is always fatal to apes.

The ... Read More

In these lean times, smart consumers refuse to pay a lot for throwaway items, but will shell out a little more for products that can be used again and again. The same is true of bacteria and other microbes, researchers at the University of Michigan have learned.

These organisms 'spend' more o... Read More

After more than a decade of research, Scripps Research Institute scientists have pieced together the structure of a human adenovirus -- the largest complex ever determined at atomic resolution. The new findings about the virus, which causes respiratory, eye, and gastrointestinal infections, may ... Read More

Extracts of broccoli and banana may help in fighting stomach problems, research suggests. Laboratory studies show fibres from the vegetables may boost the body's natural defences against stomach infections. Trials are under way to see if they could be used as a medical food for patients with Cro... Read More

When it comes to chronic fatigue syndrome, researchers are starting to ask: What’s the role of the virus known as “X”?

One of the confounding aspects of Monday’s PNAS paper that reported finding a family of retroviruses in CFS patients was that none of the viruses appeared to be XMRV, which m... Read More

The question of where and how life on Earth started has been with humans ever since the earliest days. Numerous shamans, witches, alchemists, priests and scientists attempted to uncover the answer, but their ideas and proposals oftentimes failed to produce any evidence of what they were arguing ... Read More