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Chicago - The number of Americans newly infected with HIV remained stable between 2006 and 2009, but infections rose nearly 50 percent among young black gay and bisexual men, U.S. experts said on Wednesday. New data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal progress since the peak of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. But the sharp increases in infection rates among young black men who have sex with men show there is much more work to do, they said.(Snip) While blacks represent 14 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for 44 percent of new HIV

Hospital infections kill more Americans each year than AIDS, car accidents and breast cancer combined -- and researchers are searching for solutions. This week, a study of 153 Veterans Affairs hospitals shows that doing a simple swab test to identify and isolate the few patients carrying infection-causing bacteria can save lives. It's called screening, but even more important is cleaning. Studies are rolling in that hospitals need to be cleaner. In fact, if you're visiting a friend or relative in the hospital, don't bring flowers or candy -- take gloves and a canister of bleach wipes. Hospitals do an inadequate...

How a new report on HIV infection in the Big Apple scared a health reporter into getting tested and having a frank discussion with her "boo." By Tomika Anderson My longtime lover and I were driving through Harlem when we passed a billboard that made me want to slam on the brakes and pull the car over. On it were two women -- one black and one Latina -- their pretty, youthful faces in lights. But under their pictures was a statistic that sucker-punched me: 93.4 percent. As in, 93.4 of all new HIV cases among women in NYC occur...

Just 65 years ago, David Livermore's paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn't go well, but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future. The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight....

Previously I have highlighted the benefits vitamin D has with regard to improving the immune response and helping keep infections such as flu at bay. It has been mooted that the upsurge in viral infections during the winter is connected with the generally lower vitamin D levels at this time. The traditional view is that winter infections are due to “indoor crowding.”However, research indicates that flu epidemics do not occur in the summer in crowded workplaces despite the presence of the flu virus around people who should be susceptible to infection. This is based on research by the Centers for...

OSLO, Norway – Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner. Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked. The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers have discovered antiviral proteins in cells that naturally fight off influenza infections, a finding that may lead to better ways to make vaccines and protect people against the flu. They said a family of genes act as cell sentries that guard cells from an invading influenza virus, the team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell. "This prevents the virus from even getting into the cell," said Stephen Elledge of Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Investigator at Brigham & Women's Hospital. "It is out there fighting the flu all of the time," Elledge...

Note: The following text is a quote: News Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, October 23, 2009 HHS Awards $17 Million in a New National Initiative to Fight Health Care-Associated Infections HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today announced the award of $17 million to fund projects to fight costly and dangerous health care-associated infections, or HAIs. “When patients go to the hospital, they expect to get better, not worse,” Secretary Sebelius said. “Eliminating infections is critical to making care safer for patients and to improving the overall quality and safety of the health care system. We know that it can be done,...

Data from an ongoing multi-year study suggest that people who consume deer and elk with chronic wasting disease (CWD) may be protected from infection by an inability of the CWD infectious agent to spread to people. The results to date show that 14 cynomolgus macaques exposed orally or intracerebrally to CWD remain healthy and symptom free after more than six years of observation, though the direct relevance to people is not definitive and remains under study. Cynomolgus macaques often are used as research models of human disease because they are very close genetically to humans and are susceptible to several...

MRSA, a drug-resistant germ, lurks in Washington hospitals, carried by patients and staff and fueled by inconsistent infection control. This stubborn germ is spreading here at an alarming rate, but no one has tracked these cases -- until now. Year after year, the number of victims climbed. But even as casualties mounted -- as the germ grew stronger and spread inside hospitals-- the toll remained hidden from the public, and hospitals ignored simple steps to control the threat. Over the past decade, the number of Washington hospital patients infected with a frightening, antibiotic-resistant germ called MRSA has skyrocketed from 141...

In the US, most deaths are attributable to chronic afflictions, such as heart disease and cancer. Typically the medical community has attributed these diseases to accumulated damage, such as plaque formation in arteries or mutations in genes controlling cellular replication. This view is changing. Scientists are now beginning to recognize that many of these chronic illnesses are due to microbial infections. A recent report in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that schizophrenia, a mental illness leading to errors in perception, is associated with the pathogen, Toxoplasma gondii. "Our findings reveal the strongest association we've seen yet between infection with...

(NewsTarget) Nearly five percent of patients in U.S. hospitals may have acquired a particular antibiotic resistant staph infection, according to a nationwide survey conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). Researchers surveyed a total of 1,200 hospitals and other health care facilities from all 50 states, and found 8,000 patients infected or colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) -- or 46 out of every 1,000. This suggests that up to 1.2 million hospital patients across the country may be infected every year. Colonized patients are those who were found to be carrying the bacteria in...

Restaurants in New York are inspected, without prior notice, once a year. In Los Angeles, inspections are done three times a year, and restaurants must display their grade near the front door. Why aren't hospitals held to the same rigorous standard? The consequences of inadequate hygiene are far deadlier in hospitals than in restaurants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2,500 people die each year after picking up a food-borne illness in a restaurant or prepared food store. Forty times that number -- 100,000 people -- die each year, according to the CDC, from infections contracted in...

A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported yesterday.

Superbug kills war hero who survived three years as a PoWLast updated at 00:42am on 1st September 2007  The family of a distinguished war veteran have criticised the hospital where he was infected by a killer bug. Major Sam Weller - who survived three years as a prisoner of war - died after catching Clostridium Difficile following an operation on his hip. His relatives said he had been let down by the country he fought for. Major Weller, 88, had surgery at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital but he developed an infection and was given a course of antibiotics. Weeks later...

TRENTON, N.J. -- Eleven times last year a dangerous infection broke out in a New Jersey hospital, and while the state health department's policy is to release to the public the names of pathogens and the counties where outbreak happened, it doesn't release the names of the hospitals, according to a published report. New Jersey is behind more than a dozen other states _ including neighboring New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, that have required hospitals to make infection rates public. That's in response to alarm over infections, especially those resistant to antibiotics. Hospital infections kill more than 100,000 Americans each...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Treatment errors and other breakdowns in medical care have contributed to the deaths of at least 14 inmates in the nation's largest county jail system since 1999, a newspaper reported Sunday. The jail system lacks enough doctors, nurses and other medical workers, resulting in long delays in treatment for conditions ranging from hernias to heart disease, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times found. Inmates have waited weeks for exams they were supposed to receive within 24 hours of making a request, the newspaper said. Officials acknowledge that 20 percent of inmates who ask to see...

Hotel-room surfaces can harbor viruses Nathan Seppa From San Francisco, at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Rhinovirus, which is responsible for roughly half of all common colds, survives on surfaces in hotel rooms for hours and can be transferred from there to people, a study shows. J. Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, and his colleagues obtained mucus samples from 15 people who had active rhinovirus infections. The scientists then invited each participant to spend a night in a hotel room. Each person was instructed to remain awake in...

SAN JOSE At least seven children suffered diarrhea after playing in a popular downtown fountain, and city health officials worry the water may have infected many more. The fountain at Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park has not flowed since late last week, when tests confirmed the presence of the microscopic parasite that causes cryptosporidiosis, a diarrhea-inducing virus. The health department continued investigating Thursday whether 13 more cases of cryptosporidiosis and 15 cases of salmonella in children since mid-July were linked to the tainted fountain. One child was hospitalized but has since recovered, said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, the county's public health...

POSTED: 12:01 am PST February 21, 2006 UPDATED: 9:25 am PST February 21, 2006 SEATTLE -- A 6-year-old Bellingham boy is fighting to survive a deadly infection that's killing the tissue in his face. Jake Finkbonner has necrotizing faciitis, a ravaging bacteria. Finkbonner was airlifted from Bellingham to Children's Hospital a week ago. He's had three surgeries so far to try to save his life. The problem started when the boy received a fat lip from a fall at a basketball game. Jake's father, Donny Finkbonner, said surgeons worked on his son the night he was brought to Children's Hospital...