Recent Discoveries in Public Health, Epidemiology, and Infectious Diseases
UTHSC Researcher’s Lyme Disease Intervention Headed to Market
Excerpt:
“The vaccine [Borrelia Burgdorferi Bacterin] is designed to be administered to mice in the form of pellets,” Dr. Gomes-Solecki explained. “When the mice eat the pellets, they produce antibodies in their blood to the B. burgdorferi protein contained in the pellets. When deer ticks (traditional carriers of this bacterium) take a blood meal from vaccinated mice, the antibodies in the mouse blood neutralize B. burgdorferi inside the tick, thus, no Lyme disease transmission occurs if the tick feeds on humans. So, what we’re doing indirectly is reducing the infection rate of the ticks that can transmit Lyme disease.”
UV light disinfection significantly reduces Clostridium difficile incidence
Excerpt:
“The team found that using the ultraviolet robot after a room cleaning by members of the Environmental Services team not only reduced the number of [Clostridium difficile] infections, but did so without adversely impacting room turnaround time. According to this study, room cleaning took only five minutes longer on average compared to non-study units.”
Click here for the more detailed peer-reviewed journal article.
Excerpt:
“A unique benefit of using RNA-Seq in the context of this work is the ability to characterize the early behavior of both host and parasite simultaneously, even when parasite RNA levels are proportionally very small during the early timepoints of an infection. This study provides a unique look at the host-pathogen interaction between T. cruzi Sylvio strain and a human host, and the first in-depth comparative transcriptome analysis of two different strains of parasite and their host response.”