In the Press

There is great disparity in the way we think about and address different sources of environmental infection. Governments have for decades promulgated a large amount of legislation and invested heavily in food safety, sanitation, and drinking water for public health purposes.

Revving up a process that slows down as we age may protect against atherosclerosis, a major cause of heart attacks and strokes. In findings published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine led by Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., successfully minimized artery-narrowing plaque in mice that would otherwise develop those lesions. The researchers did so by boosting chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA), a cellular housekeeping process that Dr. Cuervo discovered in 1993 and named in 2000.

An investment fund created to boost antibiotic development today announced its first round of investments in companies developing new treatments for superbugs.

Identifying genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease is essential if we are to improve our understanding and treatment of it. Progress in human genome analysis along with genome-wide association studies are now leading to major advances in the field. Researchers in Europe, the US and Australia have identified 75 regions of the genome that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Forty-two of these regions are novel, meaning that they have never before been implicated in the disease. The findings, published in Nature Genetics, bring new knowledge of the biological mechanisms at play and open up new avenues for treatment and diagnosis.

With wave after wave of SARS-CoV-2 variants, COVID-19 patients filled the worlds' hospitals and morgues because not everybody had access to vaccines or were willing to be vaccinated.1,  2 

Author summary Children who have been hospitalized in sub-Saharan Africa remain at a high risk of death and morbidity for at least 6 months following discharge. These children may harbor AMR in commensal bacteria following hospitalization, which may be associated with poor outcomes. There are limited data describing AMR and risk factors that are associated with AMR carriage at hospital discharge. In this cross-sectional study of Kenyan children under 5 years of age discharged from hospitals, we found AMR to be high. Children who received antibiotics in the hospital, had limited access to improved sanitation, and who were female had the highest prevalence of ESBL-producing E. coli.

Myocarditis or pericarditis are much more likely to follow infection with SARS-CoV2 compared with COVID-19 vaccinations, according to research published today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Two studies yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases confirm that COVID-19 vaccination confers substantial added protection—particularly against severe illness—to those previously infected with the virus.

Findings published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science in advance of World Autism Day (Saturday 2 April) reveal there are fundamental similarities between autistic and non-autistic people in mental processing.

In a paper in the journal Nature, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists Bette Korber, Hyejin Yoon, Will Fischer and James Theiler, among nearly 130 authors from institutions around the world, describe their groundbreaking collaborative work, "Defining the risk of SARS-CoV-2 variants on immune protection."