PHILADELPHIA – (Oct. 8, 2014) – Numerous experts and policy makers have called for hospitals to screen patients for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections and isolate anyone testing positive to prevent the spread of these so-called "Superbugs" in healthcare settings. Several states have enacted laws requiring patients be screened for MRSA upon admission. Two new abstracts, scheduled for presentation on Friday at IDWeek, the annual scientific meeting for infectious disease specialists, found universal MRSA screening and isolation of ...

This news release is available in French. Researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated CHU Sainte-Justine children's hospital are warning parents that difficult eaters could have underlying psychological issues, as they have found that restrictive behaviours can appear before puberty. "Many researchers believe that bulimia only appears at adolescence, but our studies indicate that the problem can arises much earlier. It is possible that it is currently under-diagnosed due to a lack of awareness and investigation," explained clinical psychologist and ...

How the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth fed, and how this allowed them to live alongside one another in prehistoric ecosystems is the subject of new research from the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum, London. The sauropods – large, long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus – dominated the land between 210 and 65 million years ago. They were the largest land animals of all time, with the biggest weighing 80 tonnes (more than 11 elephants) and would have needed vast amounts of food. Despite ...

Schools are a vital way of reaching the 10–20% of children and young people across the globe who would benefit from some sort of mental health intervention, according to a new Series on mental health interventions in schools published in The Lancet Psychiatry. The Series highlights that childhood is an important window for intervention because around 75% of adults who access mental health services have had a diagnosable disorder before the age of 18 [1]. What is more, estimates from high-income countries (HICs) indicate that only 25% of children with a mental health ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study pinpoints working memory as a source of learning difficulties in people with schizophrenia. Working memory is known to be affected in the millions of people – about 1 percent of the population – who have schizophrenia, but it has been unclear whether that has a specific role in making learning more difficult, said study lead author and Brown University postdoctoral researcher Anne Collins. "We really tend to think of learning as a unitary, single process, but really it is not," said Collins, who along ...

VIDEO: This is an animation of NIST's new method for measuring electric field strength based on the quantum properties of atoms. The technique works for abroad range of frequencies, 1-500 gigahertz,... Click here for more information. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Michigan have demonstrated a technique based on the quantum properties of atoms that directly links measurements of electric field strength to the International ...

UPTON, NY - Increasing the oil content of plant biomass could help fulfill the nation's increasing demand for renewable energy feedstocks. But many of the details of how plant leaves make and break down oils have remained a mystery. Now a series of detailed genetic studies conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and published in The Plant Cell reveals previously unknown biochemical details about those metabolic pathways-including new ways to increase the accumulation of oil in leaves, an abundant source of biomass for fuel production. Using ...

ST. LOUIS -- A vaccine that protects against an old strain of avian flu primes the immune system to mount a rapid response when a vaccine designed to protect against a related but different and new strain of avian flu is given a year later, according to Saint Louis University research findings reported in JAMA. In addition, when combined with an adjuvant, which is a chemical that stimulates the immune system to produce more antibodies, a lower dose of the new avian flu vaccine worked better in triggering an immune response than a stronger dose without adjuvant. That means ...

A one-day prevalence survey of 183 hospitals found that approximately 50 percent of hospitalized patients included in the survey were receiving antimicrobial drugs, and that about half of these patients were receiving 2 or more antimicrobial drugs, according to a study in the October 8 JAMA, a theme issue on infectious disease. Most antimicrobial use was for infection treatment. Despite the evidence supporting early, appropriate antimicrobial therapy, a substantial proportion of antimicrobial use in U.S. acute care hospitals may be inappropriate, based on factors such ...

Two randomized trials in the October 8 issue of JAMA examine new vaccination strategies for the prevention and control of avian influenza, often referred to as "bird flu." This is a theme issue on infectious disease. In one study, Mark J. Mulligan, M.D., of the Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, and colleagues compared the safety and antibody responses (immunogenicity) of different doses of influenza A/Shanghai/2/13 (H7N9) vaccine mixed with or without the MF59 adjuvant (a component that improves immunogenicity and enhances efficacy of inactivated influenza ...

Despite no lapses in the disinfection process recommended by the manufacturer being identified, specialized gastrointestinal endoscopes called duodenoscopes had bacterial contamination associated with an outbreak of a highly resistant strain of E coli at a hospital in Illinois, according to a study in the October 8 JAMA, a theme issue on infectious disease. The duodenoscope is different than that used for routine upper gastrointestinal endoscopy or colonoscopy. The procedure associated with these specialized scopes is endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), ...

Study participants who reported tobacco use or had higher levels of biomarkers of tobacco exposure had a higher prevalence of the sexually transmitted infection, oral human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV-16), according to a study in the October 8 JAMA, a theme issue on infectious disease. Oral HPV-16 is believed to be responsible for the increase in incidence of oropharyngeal squamous cell cancers in the United States. An association between self-reported number of cigarettes currently smoked per day and oral HPV prevalence has been observed, according to background information ...

Johns Hopkins scientists have shown a strong association between tobacco use or exposure and infection with oral human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV16), the sexually transmitted virus responsible for mouth and throat cancers worldwide. The numbers of such cancers have increased 225 percent in the United States over the past two decades. HPV16 is found in 80 percent of cancers located in the back of the throat and is transmitted through oral sex. "The practice of oral sex is common, but this cancer is rare. So there must be cofactors in the process that explain why some ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A decade ago, America's health care community took on heart attacks with gusto, harnessing the power of research and data to make sure that every patient got the best possible care. It worked: Death rates for heart attack have dropped. The same has happened with heart failure and pneumonia. Now, say a pair of University of Michigan Medical School experts, it's time to do the same for sepsis. Sepsis may not have the same name recognition as heart attacks -- but it now affects more hospital patients, and leads to more hospital costs, than any ...

An experimental vaccine to protect people against H7N9 avian influenza prompted immune responses in 59 percent of volunteers who received two injections at the lowest dosage tested, but only if the vaccine was mixed with adjuvant—a substance that boosts the body's response to vaccination. Without adjuvant, immune responses produced by the investigational vaccine were minimal regardless of vaccine dosage, according to findings from a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The ...

A large, NIH-sponsored clinical trial of an experimental H7N9 avian influenza vaccine found an immune response that was believed to be protective in 59 percent of study participants who received two injections of the inactivated vaccine at the lowest dosage tested when mixed with an adjuvant – a component that boosts the body's immune response and enhances the effectiveness of inactivated influenza vaccines. Participants who received a vaccine without the adjuvant had a minimal immune response. The results are published in the Journal of the American Medical ...

VIDEO: This video shows the sole of a shoe as it appears from different perspectives in rendering software. The shoe was placed upside down on an optical table (seen as flat... Click here for more information. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a laser-based imaging system that creates high-definition 3D maps of surfaces from as far away as 10.5 meters.* The method may be useful in diverse fields, including precision machining ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—University of Utah biochemists have reported a new drug discovery tool against the Ebola virus. According to a study published in this week's online edition of Protein Science, they have produced a molecule, known as a peptide mimic, that displays a functionally critical region of the virus that is universally conserved in all known species of Ebola. This new tool can be used as a drug target in the discovery of anti-Ebola agents that are effective against all known strains and likely future strains. The University of Utah (U of U) work, which was ...

The link between low average glucose blood levels and greater risk for severe hypoglycemia and hypoglycemic coma substantially declined between 1995 and 2012 in young Germans and Austrians with type 1 diabetes, according to a study published by Beate Karges and colleagues from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers obtained measurements of average blood glucose levels (measured as HbA1c) and the incidents of severe hypoglycemia and hypoglycemic coma from 37,539 children and young adults with type 1 diabetes between 1995 and 2012 ...

Treatment with dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA), an oral chelation agent, was linked to reductions in the amount of lead in blood in young children in Zamfara State, Nigeria following environmental lead contamination, according to a study by Jane Greig and colleagues from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The researchers report findings from an MSF program initiated in May 2010 to reduce lead poisoning in children following widespread environmental lead contamination due to gold mining in Zamfara State, Nigeria, leading to ...

A fundamental question in neurobiology is how animals, including humans, make decisions. A new study publishing in the open access journal PLOS Biology on October 7 reveals how fruit fly females make a very important decision: to either accept or reject male courtship. This decision appears to be generated by a very small number of excitatory neurons that use acetylcholine as their neurotransmitter located in three brain regions. This study provides the framework to understand how decisions are generated and suggests that a decision is reached because that option is literally ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have, for the first time, clearly defined the epidemiology of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), which occur primarily in the lining of the stomach and small intestine. One key finding: Patients of Asian descent, who have not previously been identified as an at-risk population, are 1.5 times more likely than other patient groups to be diagnosed with this type of tumor. Results of the study were published this week in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association ...

WASHINGTON (Oct. 7, 2014) — Nearly 20 percent of Americans have a disability, yet only 25 percent of medical schools include in their curricula caring for people with disabilities. Numerous reports have documented that people with disabilities have poorer health and receive inferior care. In a Narrative Matters essay published in Health Affairs, Leana Wen, M.D., director of patient-centered care research and assistant professor of emergency medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, shares her own experiences to highlight ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A molecule that helps cancer cells evade programmed self-destruction, an internal source of death, might also help malignant cells hide from the immune system, an external source of death. A new study by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) shows that a molecule called nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB) helps cancer cells by inhibiting the immune system's ability to detect and destroy them. The molecule regulates genes ...

DALLAS – Oct. 7, 2014 – Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found an "Achilles heel" in a metabolic pathway crucial to stopping the growth of lung cancer cells. At the heart of this pathway lies PPARγ (peroxisome proliferation-activated receptor gamma), a protein that regulates glucose and lipid metabolism in normal cells. Researchers demonstrated that by activating PPARγ with antidiabetic drugs in lung cancer cells, they could stop these tumor cells from dividing. "We found that activation of PPARγ causes a major metabolic ...