A new iPhone application, created by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, enables users to track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as H1N1 (swine flu), on the ground in real time.

With the current outbreak of swine flu, and in the absence of a vaccine or treatment at present, the only way to contain the virus is to get people around the world to take precautionary measures. In a special editorial1 in the latest issue of Springer’s International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Johannes Brug, Arja Aro, and Jan Hendrik Richardus show that there are three key parameters that convince people to take precautions against infectious diseases.

More than five million people die every year from infectious diseases, despite the availability of numerous antibiotics and vaccines. The discovery of penicillin to treat bacterial infections, along with the development of vaccines for previously incurable virus diseases such as polio and smallpox, achieved great reductions in mortality during the mid-20th century.

Most successful vaccines and drugs rely on protecting humans or animals by blocking certain bacteria from growing in their systems. But, a new theory actually hopes to take stopping infectious diseases such as West Nile virus and Malaria to the next level by disabling insects from transmitting these viruses.

An entomologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, a division of the new UI Institute for Natural Resource Sustainability, says smaller mosquitoes are more likely to be infected with viruses that cause diseases in humans.

Arpida (SWX: ARPN) today presented the combined results from two pivotal Phase III clinical trials at the 48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC)/Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) 46th annual meeting in Washington, DC.

Even very small numbers of deadly infectious agents or allergenic pollen molecules can cause big problems for humans.

A novel delivery system that could lead to more efficient and more disease-specific vaccines against infectious diseases has been developed by biomedical engineers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Scientists and news organizations typically focus on the number of dead and gravely ill during epidemics, but research at the University of Michigan suggests that less dramatic, mild infections lurking in large numbers of people are the key to understanding cycles of at least one potentially fatal infectious disease: cholera.

Extreme weather events can unleash a 'perfect storm' of infectious diseases, research study says

Every year, about 500 million people worldwide are infected with the parasite that causes dysentery, a global medical burden that among infectious diseases is second only to malaria. In a new study appearing in the June 15 issue of Genes and Development, Johns Hopkins researchers may have found a way to ease this burden by discovering a new enzyme that may help the dysentery-causing amoeba evade the immune system.

Influenza outbreaks were shorter and resulted in fewer cases and fewer deaths at long-term care facilities that started residents on preventive antiviral medications within five days of the first case, compared to those that started later, according to a new study in the July 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, currently available online.