Anthrax is an acute infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. Anthrax most commonly occurs in wild and domestic lower vertebrates (cattle, sheep, goats, camels, antelopes, and other herbivores), but it can also occur in humans when they are exposed to infected animals or tissue from infected animals.
Anthrax is most common in agricultural regions where it occurs in animals. These include South and Central America, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. When anthrax affects humans, it is usually due to an occupational exposure to infected animals or their products. Workers who are exposed to dead animals and animal products from other countries where anthrax is more common may become infected with B. anthracis (industrial anthrax). Anthrax outbreaks occur in the United States on an annual basis in livestock and wild game animals such as deer.
Anthrax infection can occur in three forms: cutaneous (skin), inhalation, and gastrointestinal. B. anthracis spores can live in the soil for many years, and humans can become infected with anthrax by handling products from infected animals or by inhaling anthrax spores from contaminated animal products. Anthrax can also be spread by eating undercooked meat from infected animals. It is rare to find infected animals in the United States.
A Drexel University engineering professor has developed a millimeter-size cantilever biosensor that can detect cells and proteins in trace samples and in only minutes.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that an enzyme produced by lung-infecting bacteria further shuts down a protein that is defective in cystic fibrosis patients.
The group led by Dr. George Georgiou developed the new antibody-production approach to improve upon processes used previously to identify new drugs.
Texas A&M University and Princeton University physicists have joined forces to perfect a powerful new weapon in the war on terrorism – a laser technique to identify deadly anthrax spores.
It's the most common bacteria-related sexually transmitted disease in the United States, so researchers at The University of Texas at San Antonio's South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (STCEID) and The University of Texas at San Antonio Health Science Center have partnered to discover a vaccine that will prevent Chlamydia.
A researcher at Montana State University has called for an innovative, new approach in developing a vaccine against genital herpes.
The Bush administration will oppose any attempts by congressional Democrats to pass legislation that would authorize the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies under the Medicare prescription drug benefit, according to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, the New York Times reports.
Emergent BioSolutions has announced that it has been awarded two grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) totaling $3.8 million to support the development of the company's anthrax immune globulin (AIG) therapeutic product.
An apparently healthy young farmer in Britain has died from rabbit flu.
Health officials in the UK say a man who died from an infection is believed to have been killed by the rare anthrax bug.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have helped develop a technique in animal models for using the abdominal cavity to exchange gas, supplementing the function normally performed by the lungs.
Federal, state, and local agencies have reached consensus on the first validated national standard for collecting, packaging, and transporting samples of visible powders that are suspected of being biological threat agents, such as anthrax.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced it will purchase 10,000 therapeutic courses of treatment of Anthrax Immune Globulin (AIG) from Cangene Corporation of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for a total of $143,833,719.
A new program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) aims to better understand the complex biochemical networks that regulate the interactions between infectious organisms and the human or animal cells they infect.
The cellular process of transcription, in which the enzyme RNA polymerase constructs chains of RNA from information contained in DNA, depends upon previously underappreciated sections of both the DNA promoter region and RNA polymerase
Anthrax vaccine administered in combination with a short course of antibiotics completely protected nonhuman primates from inhalational anthrax, the most lethal form of the disease, according to scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
Development of a fundamentally new "candidate," or potential, vaccine for visceral leishmaniasis (LEASH-ma-NIGH-a-sis), a parasitic disease that kills about 60,000 people annually, is reported in the current issue of ACS Chemical Biology. Spread by the bite of infected female sand flies, visceral leishmaniasis infects about 500,000 people annually, with the majority of cases occurring in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan and Brazil.
Not all biological weapons are created equal. They are separated into categories A through C, category A biological agents being the scariest: They are easy to spread, kill effectively and call for special actions by the pubic health system. One of these worrisome organisms is anthrax, which has already received its fair share of media attention. But work in Vince Fischetti's laboratory at Rockefeller University suggests that a newly discovered protein could be used to fight anthrax infections and even decontaminate areas in which anthrax spores have been released.
Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Toronto have designed a nanoscale assembly of molecules that successfully counteracts and inhibits anthrax toxin in animal and laboratory experiments.
Every time the human body encounters a virus, bacteria or other infectious agent, immune cells called B-lymphocytes multiply in lymph nodes and then swing into action to fight off the intruders.
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