https://medicalxpress.com/infectious-diseases-news/ en-us Latest medical news and research in Infectious diseases Dr. James Mu had braced for the call that came in late January. A patient from his rural Northern California county had measles, a disease so rare there that many physicians have never treated a case. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-vaccine-skeptical-california-county-potential.html Fri, 29 May 2026 18:20:02 EDT news699262807 In an editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine, University of Michigan Health hepatologist Anna S. Lok, M.D., hails newly announced results of the B-Well clinical trials as "a major step toward a functional cure for hepatitis B virus infection." https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-patients-functional-hepatitis-weeks-bepirovirsen.html Fri, 29 May 2026 14:40:09 EDT news699268668 A Kenyan court has reportedly shut down a plan set in motion by the Trump administration to quarantine Ebola-exposed Americans in Kenya. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-kenyan-court-blocks-trump-quarantine.html Fri, 29 May 2026 13:40:03 EDT news699279301 Uganda confirmed two new Ebola cases on Friday, bringing the total to nine—including one fatality—since the outbreak was declared on May 15 in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-uganda-ebola-cases-health-ministry.html Fri, 29 May 2026 12:00:01 EDT news699274518 A research team led by Associate Professor Noriyuki Kurita from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology and by Associate Professor Pornpan Pungpo from Ubon Ratchathani University in Thailand has proposed a novel therapeutic agent for tuberculosis, using high-precision molecular simulation techniques. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-simulation-uncovers-tuberculosis-drug-candidates.html Fri, 29 May 2026 11:20:05 EDT news699269760 The UN health chief was on Friday in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where authorities are struggling to contain the spread of a deadly Ebola outbreak but the recovery of a patient, the first since the crisis began, was confirmed. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-chief-ebola-dr-congo-recovery.html Fri, 29 May 2026 09:20:05 EDT news699263649 It's quick to spot a tick, but harder to know if that tick carries Lyme disease. Emergency room visits for tick bites provide important data for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but doctors often cannot immediately confirm whether a patient has Lyme disease. Blood tests depend on antibodies that typically take about two weeks to develop after infection. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-what-tick-tests-can-and.html Fri, 29 May 2026 09:00:09 EDT news699263295 A new way of designing antibiotics could support the discovery of new treatments for drug-resistant infections. It could also help revive antibiotics that have lost effectiveness because bacteria have evolved over time to survive the drugs meant to kill them. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-antibiotic-drug-resistant-infections.html Fri, 29 May 2026 06:00:01 EDT news699166490 Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have identified key differences in how immune cells generate and use energy, a process known as cellular metabolism, in people with latent versus active tuberculosis (TB). The findings offer new insights into why some individuals control infection while others develop disease. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-immune-energy-signature-linked-tuberculosis.html Thu, 28 May 2026 15:20:05 EDT news699198841 A vaccine against the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus will be ready by the end of the year, the head of Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-african-union-health-agency-vows.html Thu, 28 May 2026 14:40:03 EDT news699193603 A Mount Sinai-led research team has demonstrated that autoimmunity, in which the body's immune system attacks its own tissues, is responsible for the often-debilitating and confounding symptoms of long COVID in a subset of people. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-scientists-validate-link-autoimmunity-covid.html Thu, 28 May 2026 11:00:05 EDT news699120421 Why do some people recover easily from bacterial infections while others rapidly deteriorate into life-threatening sepsis? According to a new study published in Nature Communications, the answer may lie not only in the invading pathogen itself, but also in the microorganisms already living inside the gut. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-gut-microbe-worsen-sepsis-triggering.html Thu, 28 May 2026 09:40:06 EDT news699178321 Wastewater surveillance was hailed during the COVID-19 pandemic as a more equitable way to track disease. It provided a system that could monitor entire communities regardless of whether residents had access to a doctor or a test. But a study published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that wastewater surveillance carries its own built-in blind spots, and the communities bearing the brunt are the ones already most vulnerable. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-neighborhood-sampling-equity-gap-wastewater.html Wed, 27 May 2026 17:00:01 EDT news699114782 A scientific review published in the NEJM Evidence journal, coordinated by the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), evaluated outcomes of adults with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) in middle-income countries. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-exposes-major-inequalities-outcomes-community.html Wed, 27 May 2026 15:20:24 EDT news699111662 The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to send Ebola-exposed U.S. citizens to Kenya rather than bring them back to the United States for observation and treatment. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-ebola-exposed-citizens-kenya-policy.html Wed, 27 May 2026 14:20:01 EDT news699106099 Valley Fever, technically known as Coccidioidomycosis, is a dust-borne fungal infection that occurs in dry regions like the southwestern US and is proliferating in California and Arizona. California alone spends $1 billion a year on treatment. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-immune-modulation-effectively-combat-valley.html Wed, 27 May 2026 11:40:25 EDT news699093541 The deadly Ebola outbreak raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo currently has a case fatality rate under 25%—much lower than in other recent outbreaks, a WHO update has shown. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-fatality-dr-congo-ebola-outbreak.html Wed, 27 May 2026 11:40:04 EDT news699098931 International travel volumes have now fully recovered from the downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the upcoming World Cup poised to drive a surge in Canadian tourism, recent hantavirus and Ebola virus outbreaks remind us of the need to effectively manage travel-related public health risks in a world on the move. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-planes-pandemics-lessons-covid19-posed.html Wed, 27 May 2026 11:20:03 EDT news699094501 The overuse of antibiotics is increasingly leading to the emergence of infectious superbugs—dangerous bacteria that have developed antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and are therefore much harder, if not impossible, to eliminate from the body. In a review published in Trends in Immunology, researchers highlight the promise of using human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) to treat patients more effectively and tackle AMR. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-human-monoclonal-antibodies-antimicrobial-resistance.html Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:08 EDT news699026224 The true toll of long COVID may be double that of current estimates and hidden from current surveillance systems that rely on capturing diagnostic codes, according to new research led by Mass General Brigham. Investigators have used a novel AI algorithm to comb through medical records of nearly 460,000 patients with COVID-19 across 58 U.S. hospitals, finding that approximately one in six (roughly 16%) developed long COVID. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-covid-affect-million-americans-surveillance.html Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:05 EDT news699073801 Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is mainly driven by the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, which allows resistant bacteria to survive and spread. However, rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns can influence how bacteria survive, mutate, and spread, potentially increasing the exchange of antibiotic resistance genes. While previous studies have linked higher temperatures to greater levels of resistant bacteria, global quantitative studies on this relationship have been limited. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-climate-linked-antibiotic-resistance-salmonella.html Wed, 27 May 2026 09:40:07 EDT news699092701 Better heart health before the pandemic was linked to a lower risk of severe COVID-19 events, according to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Adults with the highest heart health scores at the beginning of the pandemic were nearly half as likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 when compared to those with the lowest scores. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-heart-health-affected-severe-covid.html Wed, 27 May 2026 05:00:02 EDT news699025739 Chikungunya ("to become contorted" in the Kimakonde language, named after the characteristic joint ache) is classified as one of the neglected tropical diseases by the World Health Organization. It's caused by a virus spread by Aedes mosquitoes. Symptoms include high fever, muscle and back pain, headache, fatigue, nausea, and skin rash. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-north-america-europe-hotspots-chikungunya.html Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:02 EDT news698920381 This week, the World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency due to an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The outbreak, which has already killed more than 100 people, took longer to identify as the virus species is different than the species typically responsible for Ebola outbreaks. There is no vaccine for this species of Ebolavirus, but researchers are testing the effectiveness of a vaccine for a different species of the virus, according to Ebola expert Nita Bharti, associate professor of biology and Lloyd Huck Early Career Professor at Penn State. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-qa-experts-discuss-ebola-outbreak.html Tue, 26 May 2026 13:20:09 EDT news699017041 Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is a common childhood disease. Most people catch and recover from it by the age of three. 2022 was different, though. There was a severe and early outbreak of RSV that overwhelmed hospitals. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-rsv-mutations-severe-childhood-cases.html Tue, 26 May 2026 11:40:05 EDT news699012085 Researchers have discovered how part of the body's immune system could better combat a leading cause of death for people with cystic fibrosis (CF). A team led by The University of Queensland's Professor Peter Sly and Dr. Abdullah Tarique has identified how macrophages—the white blood cells that fight infection in the body—function differently in people with CF, compared to others. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-pac-cells-deadly-infection-people.html Tue, 26 May 2026 08:40:03 EDT news699002822 A Spaniard placed under quarantine after partaking in a cruise hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak has tested positive, the Spanish Ministry of Health said on Monday. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-quarantined-spaniard-positive-hantavirus-health.html Tue, 26 May 2026 05:21:47 EDT news698991641 Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, who has been serving as acting head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for just over a year, has stepped down for unknown reasons. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-niaid-chief-ebola-hantavirus.html Mon, 25 May 2026 23:20:01 EDT news698914526 Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a common respiratory virus that can cause severe breathing complications in babies, especially those younger than 6 months old. While many adults recover quickly from RSV with mild symptoms similar to a cold, infants often face a much greater risk of hospitalization due to their developing immune systems and smaller airways. One hundred to 300 children aged less than 5 years die of RSV each year. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-maternal-rsv-vaccine-lowers-infant.html Mon, 25 May 2026 18:00:04 EDT news698933920 The countries neighboring the Democratic Republic of Congo are at high risk from Ebola and should act immediately to counter the virus, the World Health Organization's head said on Monday. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-urges-drc-neighbors-immediately-ebola.html Mon, 25 May 2026 14:20:04 EDT news698936656