Invisiverse Features — Page 3 of 11 « Invisiverse

What You Need to Know: The Dangerous Impact of Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) During Childbirth

The herpes simplex virus (HSV) can cause devastating complications for infected newborns whose mothers have genital herpes. Understanding risk and research can help you, and your baby, when the time comes.

News: Starve E Coli of Copper to Cure Aggressive UTIs

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) drive over eight million people to seek medical attention every year. Almost all — as many as 90% — of those infections are caused by Escherichia coli. Copper can kill bacteria, but E. coli has found a way to capture the copper, preventing its antibacterial action. Now, researchers have found that, in a cruel irony, the bacteria use the copper it grabs as a nutrient to feed its growth.

News: Most Pools Contain Dangerous Fecal Bacteria — Here's How to Stay Safe

With summer just ahead, you, or your children, may be looking forward to some pool time or the water park. When planning water-based fun this year, keep a heads-up for microbes.

News: Every Hour Untreated Sepsis Survival Drops 4% — Here Are the Symptoms to Watch For

Twelve-year old Rory Staunton took a dive for a basketball during gym class and came up with a cut on his arm. The school nurse applied a couple of band-aids, without cleaning the cut, and off he went. In approximately three days, hospital physicians told his parents there was nothing else that they could do for their son; he was dead.

News: Skip the Antibacterial Soap — It Isn't Helping & It Could Cause Problems

The best go-to method for reducing your risk of infection is to wash your hands. Next time you reach for the soap, here is some news you can use.

News: Untreatable 'Super Gonorrhea' Spreading Like Wildfire — Luckily, It May Have a New Opponent

In the race to outsmart "untreatable" antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, one of the three new treatments on the track is about to enter Phase 3 clinical trials. Hopefully, it'll be widely accessible sooner rather than later, for the 78 million people who are diagnosed with gonorrhea each year.

News: Finally! A Way Homeowners Can Control Ticks That Spread Lyme Disease

With a predicated increase in the number of Lyme disease cases in the coming spring season, new research endorses the use of bait boxes to control ticks on the rodents that serve as their hosts.

News: Syphilis Has Returned with New Drug Resistance

What do Leo Tolstoy (writer), Beethoven (composer), Paul Gaugin (artist), and Adolf Hitler (politician) have in common? They are all considered to have suffered from the sexually transmitted disease syphilis.

News: You Don't Need Antibiotics for Pink Eye

Crusty, itchy, red eyes? There is a decent chance you could have conjunctivitis, or pink eye, an infection of the thin lining around the eye and the eyelid, caused by bacteria, an allergen, virus, or even your contact lenses. Whatever the cause — you call up your doctor to get a prescription to clear it up, right? Not really.

News: Fecal Transplants to Cure Infections — A Modern Take on a 1,700-Year-Old Idea

Bacteriotherapy sounds a lot more amenable of a term than "fecal transplant," yet they're both treatments that use bacteria itself to cure or treat infections. Fecal transplants, specifically, are an up-and-coming treatment option for a potentially deadly and difficult-to-treat diarrheal infection called Clostridium difficile.

News: Terrifying Superbug CRE Is Spreading Out of Hospitals

A terrifying antibiotic-resistant superbug, one thought to only infect hospital patients, has made its debut in the real world. For the first time ever, the superbug carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) infected six people who hadn't been in or around a hospital in at least a year, and researchers aren't sure how they got infected.

News: What to Do if You Think Your Child Has Lyme Disease

Primarily caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, Lyme disease is the most common tickborne disease in the US. By all predictions, 2017 is expected to be a banner tick year in several regions. If you have children, it is important to know what to expect.

News: You're Eating Mold & You Don't Even Know It

Koji is a culture made up of a certain fungus (mold) called Aspergillus oryzae, which has been used to ferment rice and soybeans in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean kitchens for centuries. Koji can actually have other involved fungi, but Aspergillus oryzae is the most common, and therefore the names can be used interchangeably. Its end purpose is to enhance the flavor of items like soy sauce, sake, and miso.

News: Monthly Injection Has Potential to Replace Daily Handfuls of HIV Drugs

People infected with HIV take many different types of pills every day to decrease the amount of virus in their body, live a longer and healthier life, and to help prevent them from infecting others. That could all be in the past as new clinical trials testing the safety and effectiveness of a new type of treatment — injections given every four or eight weeks — look to be equally effective at keeping the virus at bay.

News: New Study Unveils the True Story of Kuru, a Fatal Brain Disease Spread by the Cultural Practice of Eating the Dead

Kuru is called the shaking disease, its name derived from the Fore word for "to shake." Caused by an organism that infects the part of the brain that controls coordination, people afflicted with kuru shake uncontrollably.

Tick-Borne Terror: Anaplasmosis — Symptoms, Sources & Risks

If you know that ticks spread Lyme disease, you may already know you might also catch a bunch of other infections from them. One of the lesser-known diseases spread by ticks is infection with the bacterium Anaplasma phagocytophilium, called anaplasmosis.

News: How to Know if You Have West Nile Virus

When just floating peacefully in the water with their brood mates, the Culex mosquito larvae in the image above does not look very frightening. But in their adult form, they are the prime vector for spreading West Nile virus — a sometimes mild, sometimes fatal disease.

News: Vaccine Can Prevent Bad Cholesterol from Accumulating in Blood Vessels, Potentially Prevent Heart Attacks

Heart disease is the leading cause of death of men and women in the US. Over half a million Americans die from it annually. Atherosclerosis — a build up of plaque in the arteries — is a common feature of heart disease and can be caused by smoking, fats and cholesterol in the blood, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

News: How Gut Bacteria Could Set Off the Immune System in Rheumatoid Arthritis

As if the swollen, painful joints of rheumatoid arthritis weren't enough, the disease is the result of our immune system turning against cells of our own body. Ever since this realization, scientists have worked to find the trigger that sets the immune system off. Scientists believe that gut bacteria may have a role in initiating the abnormal immune response. Now, a team of researchers from Boston has figured out how that might occur.

News: The Problem with Farmed Fish — Their Food Is Spreading Antibiotic Resistance

As the fish farming industry struggles to become more environmentally friendly, it just gained another problem. Fish food loaded with antibiotic-resistant genes.

News You Can Use: Map Shows Where Dogs & Humans Are at High Risk of Lyme Disease This Summer

Lyme is a growing threat as we move into warmer weather in the US. Researchers have said this year could be one of the worst for this tick-borne disease, as a skyrocketing mouse population and warmer temperatures increase the risk.

News: 14 Types of Bacteria & 10 Strains of Fungus Are Responsible for All the Delicious Flavors of Cheese

If you want to appreciate the value of microbes, look no further than a chunk of cheese. Because cheese roughly traces back to the Neolithic Era, we might say the earliest cheesemakers were the first humans to manipulate microbes—without even knowing it. Now, thanks to microbiologists and the long tradition of cheesemaking, we know a lot more about the microbes that make our favorite types of cheese possible.

News: Lone Star Tick Arrives in Northeast with a Deadly, Underreported Infection

The possibility of severe tickborne illness is increasing as an aggressive tick from the American southeast moves up the Atlantic Coast.

News: New Method Can Stop Malaria Spread — Even After It's in the Body

Malaria is a massive worldwide health problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 212 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide in 2015 and 429,000 of the infected people died.

News: Latent HIV Can Hide, but Can't Escape Detection with New Test

HIV infections persist despite treatment that successfully decreases viral blood levels to the point where doctors can't detect the virus. But that doesn't mean the person is cured. The virus hides in the body, not replicating, just waiting for a chance to jump out of the shadows and reemerge.

News: Microbe That Causes Sepsis & Meningitis Has Mutated into a New Sexually Transmitted Disease

The ability of one microbe to adapt is giving it a whole new career as a sexually transmitted disease. Usually content with the back of the throat and nose of those who carry it, the dangerous pathogen Neisseria meningitidis has adapted to cause an illness that looks a lot like gonorrhea.

News: Happy News: Common Drugs May Save You from MRSA

Staphylococcus aureus is a widespread bacteria — about a third of us have it on our body right now — usually in our nose or on our skin. And it probably isn't causing an infection. But, about 1% of people who have Staphylococcus aureus present have a type that is resistant to the antibiotic methicillin.

News: Radical Theory Linking Alzheimer's to Infections Could Revolutionize Treatment

There are all kinds of theories—many supported by science—about what causes Alzheimer's disease. Tangles of protein called ß-amyloid (pronounced beta amyloid) plaques are prominently on the list of possible causes or, at least, contributors. An emerging theory of the disease suggests that those plaques aren't the problem, but are actually our brains' defenders. They show up to help fight an infection, and decades later, they become the problem.

How To: Tell if You Have a Cold or the Flu

Have the sniffles? Yes. Does your head hurt? Yes. Coughing? Yes. Could you have influenza? Yes. How do you know the difference? With these symptoms, you could also have a cold.

News: Another Good Reason to Keep Your Cat Indoors — Tick Bites Can Kill

Like humans, cats can suffer infections caused by ticks, and too often, the disease is fatal. Learn about tickborne diseases that affect cats and what you can do to protect Fluffy from an untimely demise.

News: A Common Cancer-Causing Mono Virus Has a Special Trick to Hide from the Body's Defenses

Most of us have already had an encounter with the Epstein-Barr virus, or EBV, for short. As part of the herpes family, it's one of the most common disease-causing viruses in humans. We get the disease with (or without) some nasty symptoms, then we recover. However, EBV stays in our body after the illness has ended, and it's one of the few viruses known to cause cancer.

News: Beware Your Child's Sandbox — Dangerous Pathogens Could Be Playing There Too

For younger children, a day at the playground is not complete without some sandbox time. Long a favorite of children and parents, sandboxes could also be sheltering dangerous pathogens.

News: Don't Believe That Whole Wheat Is Healthier — Your Gut Bacteria May Think Differently

Move over whole wheat — white bread may be back in style after a new study shows that it may be your gut microbes that decide what kind of bread is best for you.

News: Bed Bugs Are Becoming Resistant to All of Our Insecticides—This Fungus Might Help

If you have encountered bed bugs lately, you are not alone. While the pesticides used to fight these pests are losing effectiveness, a fungus shows promise in knocking the bugs out of beds everywhere.

News: CDC Reports 2600% Increase in Tick-Borne Babesiosis Infections in Wisconsin in 12 Years

It is not just a bad summer for ticks — it has been a bad decade for the spread of tick-borne infections. New surveillance from the CDC reports rapid expansion and increase in cases of babesiosis, a sometimes life-threatening disease, in Wisconsin.

News: Some Treatments for 'Chronic Lyme' Are More Deadly Than the Disease Itself

While Lyme disease can be disabling, the wrong treatment for the infection can be fatal.

The Giving Plant: Same Asian Plant Used for Arthritis Treatment Gives Us Powerful HIV Drug

Natural remedies used through the ages abound, especially in Asian medicine. The willow-leaved justicia plant, found throughout Southeast Asia, has traditionally been used to treat arthritis, but scientists have just discovered it contains an anti-HIVcompound more potent than AZT. AZT was the first drug approved to treat HIV, and is still used in HIV combination therapy today.