Cassava experts are reporting new outbreaks and the increased spread of Cassava Brown Streak Disease or CBSD, warning that the rapidly proliferating plant virus could cause a 50 percent drop in production of a crop that provides a significant source of food and income for 300 million Africans.
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Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "is seeking a further $1.5 billion in donations to wipe out polio by 2018 and make it the first infectious disease eradicated since smallpox was wiped from the planet in 1979".
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The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases will host the 16th Annual Conference on Vaccine Research, April 22-24, 2013, at the Hyatt Regency Inner Harbor in Baltimore, MD.
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The pathogen that we are talking about is called streptococcus pneumoniae. That is a fairly common bacteria and if you did a nasal swab you would find that quite a lot of people have this bacterium living in their nasal passages.
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Hundreds of scientists, doctors and other experts from around the world launched the Scientific Declaration on Polio Eradication today, declaring that an end to the paralyzing disease is achievable and endorsing a comprehensive new strategy to secure a lasting polio-free world by 2018.
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As part of a multicenter clinical trial, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine are evaluating Pexa-Vec (JX-594) to slow the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma or liver cancer. Pexa-Vec is a genetically engineered virus that is used in the smallpox vaccine.
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Transgene SA, a biopharmaceutical company that develops targeted immunotherapy products to treat major unmet medical needs in cancer and infectious diseases, today announced that favourable pre-clinical and clinical data on two Transgene products - TG1050 and TG4040 to treat chronic hepatitis B and chronic hepatitis C, respectively - will be presented in oral presentations at this year's European Association for the Study of the Liver Conference (Amsterdam, Netherlands, April 24-28, 2013).
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A Saint Louis University researcher has received a contract worth up to $980,000 to see if two cancer medications have the potential of protecting U.S. troops from biological agents that could be unleashed during an attack.
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Decades of research and three large-scale clinical trials have so far failed to yield an effective HIV vaccine, in large part because the virus evolves so rapidly that it can evade any vaccine-induced immune response.
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Chimerix, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing novel, oral antivirals in areas of high unmet medical need, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Fast Track designation for CMX001 for the prevention of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection.
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Inviragen, Inc. today announced the initiation of the second stage of an ongoing Phase 2, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of DENVax, the Company's investigational dengue vaccine.
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"It has been a particularly busy couple of months for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI)," SciDev.Net Director Nick Ishmael Perkins writes in a SciDev.Net editorial. "The deadly attacks on vaccinators in Pakistan brought renewed global attention to the campaign, and then Bill Gates went public with his personal commitment to end polio," he states, adding, "The GPEI has responded with a strategy for what it calls the 'endgame.'"
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Washington University engineering researchers have created a new type of air-cleaning technology that could better protect human lungs from allergens, airborne viruses and ultrafine particles in the air.
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"Since the eradication of smallpox in the late 1970s, no other diseases have followed suit; the goal that has come closest so far is eradication of polio," a Lancet Infectious Diseases editorial states, noting that in 2012 only about 250 people were infected with polio worldwide.
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"It's not a race, exactly, but there's an intriguing uncertainty about whether a former U.S. president or a software magnate will cause the next deliberate extinction of a species in the wild. Will Jimmy Carter eradicate Guinea worm before Bill Gates eradicates polio?" Wall Street Journal commentator Matt Ridley asks in his "Mind & Matter" column.
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President Obama on Tuesday called on Congress to put off -- again -- the start of the "sequester," a series of across-the-board spending cuts that would save $1.2 billion over 10 years.
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"Since the last case of naturally occurring smallpox, in 1977, there have been three major international conferences devoted to the concept of disease eradication," an article in the New England Journal of Medicine reports and includes "a brief review of five diseases selected for eradication or elimination that illustrate the potential benefits of such efforts and some of the challenges they pose."
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Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may have affected humans for much longer than is currently believed. Alfred Roca, an assistant professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, thinks that the genomes of an isolated West African human population provide important clues about how the disease has evolved.
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Scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, have received more than $16 million in Australian Government funding to pursue research into cancer, malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and the immune system, it was announced today.
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Writing in the Global Bioethics Blog, Stuart Rennie, a bioethics researcher and professor, notes another polio worker was killed in Pakistan last week and describes Taliban opposition to U.S.-supported polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan.
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