With increasing resistance to existing antibiotics, developing countries face a serious challenge in safeguarding their populations' health against killer diseases such as TB and typhoid fever

http://www.scidev.net/en/health/antibiotic-resistance

El Ministerio de Salud y el gobierno regional de Arequipa han encontrado en el cine itinerante un modo alternativo de difundir la prevención contra la tuberculosis, especialmente entre niños y adolescentes de zonas aisladas donde es muy difícil llegar con otras formas de divulgación.

Fourth Global Report

A malaria vaccine has performed well in a small clinical trial of adults in Mali, leading to testing being expanded to children.

The results of the adult trial — carried out by Mahamadou Thera and colleagues from the Malaria Research and Training Center of the University of Bamako in Mali, and US universities — were published this month (23 January) in PLoS One.

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Scientists have found that blood group O can be a defence against the development of severe, life-threatening malaria in children.

They hope their discovery may prove useful in finding a treatment for severe malaria in children with other blood groups.

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An outbreak of chikungunya virus in the southern Indian state of Kerala has prompted researchers to develop a new diagnostic test to distinguish chikungunya from dengue viruses.

The kit works as early as the second or third day of symptoms, whereas conventional tests can only detect antibodies a week after infection.

HIV-infected people with a lower amount of the virus in their blood have the potential to infect more people than those with a high viral load, suggests new research.

The study was published last week (22 October) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dutch and UK scientists analysed data from untreated groups of people infected with HIV in Holland, Uganda and Zambia.

Without new interventions, cases of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) in rural South Africa will increase dramatically over the next five years, according to a study.

The research was published last week (27 October) in The Lancet.

The study, which modelled the effect of various infection control measures on the spread of XDR-TB in the rural community of Tugela Ferry in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, suggests that infection rates will increase from 194 cases in 2007 to an estimated average of 234 cases a year by 2012.

A web portal to help people identify and use vital information related to infectious diseases was launched yesterday (30 October) at Forum 11, the annual meeting of the Global Forum for Health Research.

TropIKA.net, run by the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR), will provide free information chosen by experts for practical use in infectious disease studies.

"It works as a window reflecting what's going on in this field," said Robert G. Ridley, director of TDR, at the launch event.

The antimalarial drug artemisinin shows promise as a treatment for leishmaniasis, according to Indian researchers.

The research was published in the September issue of the Journal of Medical Microbiology.

Visceral leishmaniasis — also known as kala-azar — is caused by the Leishmania parasite and transmitted to humans through biting insects such as sand flies. The parasite lowers immunity and causes persistent fever, anaemia, liver and spleen enlargement, and is lethal if left untreated.