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Bleeding, not inflammation, is major cause of early lung infection death
Date:8/27/2007

a central responsibility of the human immune system. Vaccines are mixtures, made of parts of many bacterial strains in this case, designed to help the immune system recognize and remember an invader without causing a full-scale infection. The hope is that when the real disease comes along, the immune system will be primed to combat it. Complicating matters, children under two, the elderly and those with HIV have weaker immune systems than a typical healthy adult. Thus, they cannot mount as strong an immune response to a vaccine that would later protect them against the actual infection. Even worse, bacteria can thwart the protection afforded by vaccines by reproducing and evolving so quickly that they become unrecognizable to both vaccine and immune system. For all these reasons, new, more effective ways to treat these infections are major thrust of research efforts worldwide.

Pneumococcal infection is characterized by fluid build-up in the lungs, and breathing difficulty is the reason that most infections become lethal early on, said Jae Hyang Lim, Ph.D., DVM, instructor in Microbiology & Immunology at the Medical Center and first author on the paper. The medical establishment had for years believed that the breathing difficulty was brought on by inflammation: the swelling and fluid build-up caused as immune system proteins rushed to the lungs to fight the infection. A medical mystery emerged, however, when our studies revealed that such inflammation was actually lower during the early time period when most people died.

The newly published study reveals for the first time that a toxin released by S. pneumoniae causes severe bleeding in the lungs. Normally, competing regulatory pathways maintain a balance between the competing tendencies of blood to either become thinner (more likely to leak bleed out of vessels) or thicker (more likely form blood clots that choke off blood flow through blood vessels). Blood clots can represent either a dangerous b
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Contact: Greg Williams
Greg_Williams@urmc.rochester.edu
University of Rochester Medical Center
Source:Eurekalert

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