We’ve known how to control typhoid for over 100 years. The rapid current increase of drug-resistant variants in both rich and poor countries is down to decades of short-sighted global health policies.
A promising new approach to treating MS tricks defective immune cells into thinking they are attacking the body, when they are in fact being attacked themselves.
Entire populations of prawn ‘super-females’ are now being commercially distributed. The science behind this continues to advance and could have a far-reaching impact on both humans and animals.
Tobias Deuse, University of California, San Francisco
The idea behind regenerative medicine is that the patient is both the donor and recipient of healthy tissue grown from stem cells. But sometimes the transplanted cells are rejected. Now we know why.
Almost all drugs are tested in living animals before human clinical trials. But most of the time what works in mice doesn’t work in humans. That’s why lab-grown human livers may be so valuable.
Just like the gut, the skin and the mouth, the eye also has a collection of microbes that keep it healthy. Understanding the eye microbiome may lead to new probiotic therapies.
Using a large family whose members suffered from mitral valve prolapse, one of the most common heart diseases worldwide, researchers have discovered one cause of the disorder.
Scientists identified the general pattern of measles infections as a country moves toward eliminating the disease. This roadmap can help public health workers most efficiently fight and end measles.
Hernán Cortés owed his conquest of the Aztecs to his expedition’s unknown, unseen secret weapon: the smallpox virus. Disease epidemics can set the course of human history.
In January, measles returned to the Pacific Northwest, while Ebola resurged in the Congo. It would take a lot more research for scientists to be able to stop threats like these in their tracks.
Scientists still rely on a set of 19th century postulates to identify disease-causing organisms but more than 100 years of research shows why we need to move on.
Laura Sumrall, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Reports of demonic possession are once again on the rise. But during the devil’s last apogee in early modern Europe, demonic afflictions were taken seriously by both priests and physicians.