Pneumonia in Biological News

Cost-effective measures could stop child pneumonia deaths

... immunization coverage and the management of pneumonia cases could be cost-effective and significantly ... child mortality by 17 percent and could reduce pneumonia deaths by more than 90 percent. pneumonia is a leading cause of death of infants in many ...

Older men more likely than women to die after pneumonia

... men who are hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). The findings, published online in the ... when most patients had recovered from the pneumonia and left the hospital." "To our knowledge, ... septic shock, organ dysfunction or death. Because pneumonia is the most common cause of sepsis, patients with ...

From foe to friend: Researchers use salmonella as a way to administer vaccines in the body

... to induce immunity against the bacteria causing pneumonia or other infectious diseases," Curtiss said. ... mechanism. Speaking about the application of a pneumonia antigen, team leader Wei Kong, of the Biodesign ... to use live Streptococcus pneumoniae causing pneumonia for a vaccine, we would obviously kill the ...

Gene chips used to distinguish ventilator-associated pneumonia from underlying critical illness

... for the first time they can distinguish pneumonia associated with ventilator use from other serious ... test for diagnosing infection in particular pneumonia and predicting patients' recovery," says J. ... determine which patients are destined to develop pneumonia based on early changes in the activity of genes ...

Zinc may reduce pneumonia risk in nursing home elderly

... in the blood may help reduce the risk of pneumonia development in that population. Based on our ... in their blood reduced their risk of developing pneumonia by about 50 percent. Additionally, deaths from ... participants have a higher risk of developing pneumonia when they did become sick, they did not recover ...

Study finds environmental tests help predict hospital-acquired Legionnaires' disease risk

... bacteria first were identified as causing pneumonia in 1976 following an outbreak among attendees at ... health care institutions monitor patients for pneumonia incidence before doing environmental surveillance ... among the 633 patients with hospital-acquired pneumonia whose urine or sputum samples were tested for ...

LSUHSC's Kolls awarded $1.8 million to improve vaccine strategies for P. carinii pneumonia

... proteins on the surface of the fungus that causes Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) can be used to prevent the infection. Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia remains a serious complication in patients with weakened immune systems, ...

Stress signals link pre-existing sickness with susceptibility to bacterial infection

... particularly in the lungs or respiratory tract. A new study published in Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM), shows that infection with the pneumonia causing bacteria Legionella , is facilitated by an increased amount of a signaling protein that is associated with mitochondrial disease. Patients ...

When children have breathing problems

... that lasted about two years. With a parent-completed questionnaire data about the children's health symptoms were asked, such as coughs, wheezing, pneumonia and asthma attacks. Some of the children from each of the four regions were also invited to take a lung function test by the local paediatricians ...

UTSA infectious disease researchers advancing vaccine against Valley fever

... one to three weeks after inhalation. Although less than one percent of infected individuals experience severe symptoms, such as chronic-progressive pneumonia or meningitis, the incidence of reported primary pulmonary infection cases in Arizona and California is on the rise, having significantly increased ...

Penn State entomologists seek fungus to blunt mosquitoes' sense of smell

... round of the program. Grand Challenges focuses on novel approaches to prevent and treat infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases. The researchers, who include Thomas Baker and Matthew Thomas, professors of entomology and Andrew Read, professor of ...

Findings uncover new details about mysterious virus

... until 2003. The virus infects amoebas, but it is thought to possibly be a human pathogen because antibodies to the virus have been discovered in pneumonia patients. However, many details about the virus remain unknown, said Michael Rossmann, Purdue University's Hanley Distinguished Professor of ...

New vaccine developed for preventing 'uncommon cold' virus

... adenovirus was first seen in the 1950s and is associated with a wide spectrum of illnesses including conjunctivitis, upper respiratory infections, pneumonia and gastrointestinal disease. More than 50 unique serotypes of the virus have been identified, with even more expected to be isolated. Adenovirus ...

Research elucidates way lungs fight bacteria and prevent infection

... NEW YORK (Jan. 23, 2009) Actor and pancreatic cancer patient Patrick Swayze's recent hospitalization with pneumonia as a result of his compromised immune system underscores the sensitivity of the lungs: many patients die from lung complications of a disease, rather ...

UT Public Health researchers find link to severe Staph infections

... Brown said, "The [vaccination] route and infection routes correlated with each other i.e., intranasally-immunized mice were better protected against pneumonia than subcutaneously vaccinated mice and subcutaneously-vaccinated mice were better protected against a skin infection than against pneumonia. This ...

ETH Zurich study on salmonella self-destruction

... may be quite common among pathogenic bacteria, for example, among the pathogens causing diarrhoea after antibiotic treatment (clostridia) or pneumonia (streptococci). Essential findings Professor Ackermann says that "Random processes could promote job-sharing in many different types of ...

Recurrence of group B strep high in subsequent pregnancies, say UT Houston obstetricians

... happen within hours of birth. They can include: difficulty breathing; heart, blood pressure, kidney and gastrointestinal problems; and sepsis, pneumonia or meningitis. Some of the symptoms that increase a woman's risk of passing GBS to her baby include: labor before 37 weeks, rupture of her ...

Professor Brian Greenwood awarded first Hideyo Noguchi Africa Award

... generous award can be used most effectively to support young African scientists in the fight against the major infectious diseases such as malaria, pneumonia and meningitis which still kill over two million African children every year. Professor Malegapuru William Makgoba, Vice-Chancellor & Principal of ...

Engineer to spearhead research into cell metabolism and medical injuries

... and as a result, ventilator-associated lung injury (VALI) is a common and significant occurrence. Prolonged stays in the ITU may be generated, pneumonia may be precipitated and lifelong lung scarring may result. The scale of the problem is such that 2.9% of people receiving mechanical ventilation ...

Solving an avian scourge could also provide benefits to human health

... as a Trojan horse against a variety of harmful pathogens. By using a similar approach, his team is currently developing a vaccine against bacterial pneumonia in a $15 million project funded primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For the USDA project, the APEC genes would be shuttled into ...

Legionnaire's bacterial proteins work together to survive

... lead author, Craig Roy, associate professor of microbial pathogenesis at Yale. Legionnaires disease acquired its name in 1976 when an outbreak of pneumonia occurred among people attending a convention of the American Legion in Philadelphia. The bacteria that causes itLegionella pneumophilareplicates ...

Bleeding, not inflammation, is major cause of early lung infection death

... Streptococcus pneumoniae infects the upper respiratory tracts of the elderly and young children mostly. There are 500,000 cases of pneumococcal pneumonia annually in the United States, with about 40,000 of them fatal, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Those numbers would be ...

Tips from the Journals of the American Society for Microbiology

... S. aureus is a highly flexible and potentially dangerous pathogen capable of causing skin abscesses, wound infections, endocarditis, osteomyelitis, pneumonia and toxic shock syndrome. Due to the organisms ability to live inside cells, emerging strains are increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Currently, ...

Study begins to reveal clues to the cause and progression of sepsis

... can be based. For this analysis, researchers evaluated data from 1,886 of the study participants who were hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), the leading cause of severe sepsis. More than 30 percent of the subjects developed severe sepsis, of whom 26 percent died. To determine ...

Bacteria from patient's dental plaque causes ventilator-associated pneumonia

... which can be fatal. Ventilator-associated pneumonia is a major cause of infection in the hospital, ... in their plaque and were suspected of having pneumonia were selected for analysis. Protein and DNA ... and bronchial samples of the nine patients with pneumonia were identical to profiles of bacteria from their ...

UGA scientists unravel 'molecular inch-worm' structure of walking-pneumonia bacterium

... pneumonia," a term that describes cases of pneumonia that are distinct from acute, life-threatening pneumonia requiring a patient's hospitalization. ... new drug targets and therapies to stop walking pneumonia and chronic bronchitis infections in their ....

Bocavirus infection may be associated with pneumonia in Thailand, especially in children

... human bocavirus was found in nearly 5 percent of pneumonia patients in rural Thailand, mostly in very young ... that human bocavirus may be associated with pneumonia in Thailand, especially among young children," ... IEIP population-based surveillance for severe pneumonia patients of all ages is a unique opportunity to ...

Measuring hormone cuts antibiotic use in half in pneumonia patients

... help doctors greatly reduce the number of days pneumonia patients have to take antibiotics to cure their ... Conference on May 24. In the study, pneumonia patients whose level of the hormone procalcitonin ... Tamm said. Many cases of community-acquired pneumonia are caused by bacteria, which require treatment ...

New Estimates For The Causes Of Child Deaths Worldwide

... occur annually are attributable to six causes: pneumonia (19%), diarrhoea (18%), malaria (8%), neonatal sepsis or pneumonia (10%), preterm delivery (10%), and asphyxia at ... of all child deaths. Infection of the blood or pneumonia in newborn babies ...

Lab-on-a-chip could speed up treatment of drug-resistant pneumonia

... up obstinate, life-threatening infections such as pneumonia. "When you get pneumonia in the hospital, you're much more likely to get a resistant strain," ... nine panel organisms, we'll cover 80 to 90 percent of hospital-acquired pneumonia cases," Lochhead said. The company also hopes to apply the technology ...

Flu not the only germ threat this time of year

... thousands of children annually as the biggest cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia among infants and children under 1 year of age. For more than a decade ... and that RSV infection caused more than 10 percent of hospitalizations for pneumonia during the winter. "At least with the flu, we have something to control ...

RNAi shows promise in gene therapy, Stanford researcher says

... that cause hepatitis and HIV in mice. With three human RNAi gene therapy trials now under way - two in macular degeneration and one in RSV pneumonia - the technique Kay pioneered may be among the first to find widespread use for treating human diseases. "We've worked on a gene therapeutic ...

New approach could lower antibiotic requirements by 50 times

... them to throw out antibiotics. A pore in the cell wall would obviously cancel the efflux effect,' Hagens explains. Pseudomonas bacteria cause pneumonia and are a common cause of hospital-acquired infections. Experiments in mice revealed that 75% of those infected with a lethal dose of Pseudomonas ...

Air travel and flu: Post-9/11 restrictions delayed start of season

... investigated the effects of air travel on the annual spread of flu in the US. The researchers analyzed government records on deaths from flu and pneumonia in cities from nine regions of the US between 1996 and 2005. For each year, they determined the time it took for the epidemic to spread across the ...

SARS: No evidence that any of the treatments worked

... Health Organization and has been published in PLoS Medicine. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is caused by a virus; the main symptoms are pneumonia and fever. The virus is passed on when people sneeze or cough. In 2003 there were over 8,000 cases and 774 deaths worldwide. The situation was ...

Gene chip technology shows potential for identifying life-threatening blood infection

... issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. "If someone came into the hospital with a cough and had a working diagnosis of pneumonia or someone came in with abdominal pain with a suspicion of infection, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could run a blood test in the emergency ...

Study indicates dramatic rise in antibiotic-resistant community-acquired staph infections

... through cuts or rashes. Those infections can remain minor, or lead to illnesses ranging from boils or abscesses to necrotizing skin infections, pneumonia and sometimes blood stream infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that staph is one of the leading causes of skin ...

Outsmarting the smartie bug

... name Streptococcus pneumoniae) are widespread, causing non-invasive disease, such as ear and sinus infections, and rarer, invasive disease, such as pneumonia and meningitis. About one in three children each year has an ear infection, of which about one-third will be due to the pneumococcus. More ...

Scientists look to the Bahamas as a model for coral reef conservation

... anything wrong and people take the organisms with them to their graves." It's not that the organisms in question - such as the bacteria that cause pneumonia or meningitis - are innocuous, he said. It's just that most of the individuals do not get disease from being infected. The best recent example of ...