Working out of a tribal-owned hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, liver specialist Brian McMahon has spent decades treating the long shadow of hepatitis B. Before a vaccine became available in the 1980s, he saw the virus claim ...
Dec 3, 2025
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Infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue, and tuberculosis are considered to pose as great a challenge to global health as new or emerging pathogens, according to a major international study led by The Global Health Network ...
Dec 2, 2025
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Feeding bread to a donkey to treat whooping cough, rubbing a black snail on a wart and impaling it on a thorn are two of the hundreds of remarkable rural Irish remedies once believed to cure ailments.
Dec 1, 2025
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A new study from UC San Francisco shows it may be possible to control HIV without long-term antiviral treatment—an advance that points the way toward a possible cure for a disease that affects 40 million people around the ...
Dec 1, 2025
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Thousands of clinical trial participants lost access to important medical studies this year after the Trump administration terminated hundreds of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, according to new research published ...
Nov 18, 2025
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A new study provides a powerful way to study infections in environments that closely mimic human organs. The strategy, tested in a bone-marrow-on-chip model, was developed by researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global ...
Nov 18, 2025
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Trypanosomatids are parasites that can result in more than 1 billion potentially fatal infections per year globally. In Africa, Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), better known as sleeping sickness, causes a devastating ...
Nov 17, 2025
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Researchers at the Kennedy Institute have provided the most comprehensive overview to date of how the distinctive segmented nucleus of neutrophils influences their function in health and disease.
Nov 14, 2025
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Rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and extreme weather events create ideal conditions for pathogens and their vectors—such as mosquitoes, midges and ticks—to thrive.
Nov 13, 2025
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Tuberculosis (TB) continues to be one of the world's leading causes of infectious disease-related illness and death. Despite being treatable, gaps in screening and diagnosis have allowed the disease to persist as a major ...
Nov 12, 2025
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Infectious diseases, also known as contagious diseases or transmissible diseases, and include communicable diseases, comprise clinically evident illness (i.e., characteristic medical signs and/or symptoms of disease) resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism. In certain cases, infectious diseases may be asymptomatic for much or all of their course. Infectious pathogens include some viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, multicellular parasites, and aberrant proteins known as prions. These pathogens are the cause of disease epidemics, in the sense that without the pathogen, no infectious epidemic occurs.
Transmission of pathogen can occur in various ways including physical contact, contaminated food, body fluids, objects, airborne inhalation, or through vector organisms. Infectious diseases that are especially infective are sometimes called contagious and can be easily transmitted by contact with an ill person or their secretions. Infectious diseases with more specialized routes of infection, such as vector transmission or sexual transmission, are usually regarded as contagious but do not require medical quarantine of victims.
The term infectivity describes the ability of an organism to enter, survive and multiply in the host, while the infectiousness of a disease indicates the comparative ease with which the disease is transmitted to other hosts. An infection is not synonymous with an infectious disease, as some infections do not cause illness in a host.
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