Using drinkable tap water to clean wounds does not increase infection rates, according to the findings of a Cochrane Review. There is, however, no evidence that it reduces infection rates or increases healing rate over leaving the wound alone.

“One small water line feeding one hospital faucet alone can house millions of bacteria,” said international Legionella expert Janet Stout, Ph.D., urging public health and infection control officers to be proactive against Legionella and other waterborne microbes that contribute to soaring hospital infection rates.

There is a close relationship between infection outbreaks on teeth and the presence of alopecia areata or localized alopecia, a type of hair loss which has an unknown origin. Alopecia areata starts with bald patches on the scalp, and sometimes elsewhere on the body.

Fever is an effective defence against disease, but new research suggests that not all animals use it when exposed to infection. The study, published online in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology, found large differences in fever responses among closely related species of mice and suggests that an animal’s reproductive strategy could explain some of this intriguing variation.

Surgeons are being advised to consider the supermarket as well as the drugs cupboard when it comes to effective wound healing, according to a research review published in the October issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.

More than 150 million people worldwide are infected with filarial parasites -- long, thread-like worms that can live for years inside the human body and cause severe, debilitating diseases such as elephantiasis.

A team of dermatologists and dermatopathologists at UT Southwestern Medical Center has identified nine North Texas cases of an infectious skin disease common in South America, Mexico and in the Middle East, where it is sometimes referred to as a “Baghdad boil.”

Not all patients with sepsis mount the same immune response, even when they look the same clinically, according to findings from the first large-scale natural history study of sepsis.

A universal influenza vaccine that has been pioneered by researchers from VIB and Ghent University is being tested for the first time on humans by the British-American biotech company Acambis. This vaccine is intended to provide protection against all ‘A’ strains of the virus that causes human influenza, including pandemic strains.

Scientists have made significant advances towards the development of a technique that could be used to confirm whether someone is infected with variant CJD.

Researchers have shown that a recently developed laboratory method to amplify prions (Protein Misfolding Cyclic Amplification) can be applied to variant CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease). The work was carried out by scientists at the National CJD Surveillance Unit at the University of Edinburgh, the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service, Neuropathogenesis Unit and CSL Behring. It is published this month in the Journal of Pathology.

University of Florida researchers have revealed how the inhaled form of anthrax paralyzes the body's defenses and prevents immune cells from reaching the site of infection.