So goes a thousand-year-old Anglo Saxon recipe to vanquish a stye, an infected eyelash follicle. The medieval medics might have been on to something. A modern-day recreation of this remedy seems to alleviate infections caused by the bacteria that are usually responsible for styes. The work might ultimately help create drugs for hard-to-treat skin infections. The project was born when Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to Christina Lee, an Anglo Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium called Bald's Leechbook, housed in the British Library.
With painstaking effort, a group of Chicago hospitals has managed to cut by half the number of infections caused by an especially deadly type of superbug. Now U.S. health officials want that kind of campaign to go national. The White House on Friday told the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slash rates of infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria by 2020 as part of a plan to prevent patient deaths and curb overuse of antibiotics administered to humans and animals. The CDC is pointing to the success of the Chicago Prevention Epicenter, one of five such CDC-funded programs nationally that coordinate research between local scientists and public health officials.
Officials at the University of Washington Medical Center soon will begin performing face transplants, hand transplants and more after the hospital received federal approval this week to conduct the life-altering operations. The United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, added the UW Medical Center Friday to a list of 20 hospitals nationwide authorized to perform so-called vascularized composite allograft (VCA) transplants. That's a newly defined category of organ transplant that includes body parts composed of several kinds of tissue, with working blood supplies, that can be donated as a single unit from one person to another.
The White House is due to issue an ambitious plan to slow the growing and deadly problem of antibiotic resistance over the next five years, one that requires massive investments and policy changes from a broad array of U.S. government health agencies, according to a copy of the report reviewed by Reuters. The 60-page report is the first ever to tackle antibiotic resistance so broadly. It was compiled by a government task force led by the administration's top officials for health, agriculture and defense. A White House official confirmed that it would release the plan on Friday.
The Ebola virus that is causing the current outbreak in West Africa is not mutating as quickly as earlier reports had suggested, a new study finds. This finding helps allay fears that the virus could change into a more infectious or deadly form, the researchers said. In the study, published online today (March 26) in the journal Science, researchers compared virus samples from people in Africa who became infected with Ebola up to nine months apart. They found that the viruses' genetic sequences were almost identical, meaning that the virus had undergone relatively few mutations -- or changes in the genetic sequence -- over that time period, the researchers said
The maker of medical scopes that have been linked to two recent "superbug" outbreaks at California hospitals has issued new cleaning instructions for the devices amid scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers and medical professionals. Olympus America sent the new guidelines to U.S. hospitals on Thursday, recommending that its customers begin using them as soon as possible. The updated guidelines call for using a smaller cleaning brush and additional flushing steps to remove debris and disinfect the scope's crevices and hinges. Olympus plans to send the new brush to hospital customers by May 8.