Gale Scott

Respiratory viruses send patients of all ages to hospitals. A University of Massachusetts team analyzed exactly which viruses were most common and the degrees to which they made people ill.

Having HIV puts patients co-infected with hepatitis C at far higher risk. A Baltimore team looked at using statins to slow the course of the liver disease.

Using "big data" a research team from the University of Chicago and other institutions found that where infectious disease training programs are more common, patients with HIV/AIDS do better.

Consults with infectious disease specialists improved outcomes for patients with SAB, a Canadian team reports.

Percutaneous liver biopsy is a proven way to rate the fibrosis stage both in hepatitis in chronic hepatitis C patients and hepatitis B patients. But it is uncomfortable for patients, risks complications and is prone to assembling errors. Reporting at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA, Tuma Demirdal, DR, and colleagues at the Katip Celebi University in Izmir, Turkey compared these invasive tests with non-invasive methods.

Infection with candida can be fatal. Reporting at ID Week 2015, a team from South Korea reported that C.tropicalis is the predominant cause of persistent infection.

Tea time was hazardous at a Tokyo pediatric hospital. In a cautionary tale for other hospitals, Kenta Ito, MD and colleagues reporting at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA, said researchers found carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae (CRE) in a contaminated tea dispenser.

Eye banks are generally thought to be a safe place to get tissue for corneal transplant. But a New Hampshire team reporting at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA said they found two post-operative candida infections in corneal transplant recipients .

In ethnically diverse groups of hospital workers latent tuberculosis infection may need to be addressed. Exposure to Mycobacterium tuberculosis is higher in health care workers who were not born in the US. Reporting at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, Cal, researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said the hospital had more success with some treatment regimens for such workers than with others.

The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases reports promising preclinical results on an antiviral for Ebola. In findings presented at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA, Travis Warren, PhD, a principal investigator said a collaboration with Gilead on a compound known as GS-5734 completely protected rhesus monkeys after they were infected with the virus.

In the UK's National Health Service, physicians are "bare below the elbows" meaning they wear scrubs and not white coats, dress shirts and ties. At ID Week, in an entertaining but serious debate, two infection control specialists tackled the question of whether US physicians should also go bare.

Nine million US children have not been vaccinated for measles, raising concerns that there could be major outbreaks of the illness, researchers said at ID Week 2015.

Neurologists seeing patients with seizures who are from developing countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and other countries with much poverty and poor sanitation should be on the lookout for neurocysticercosis, a condition related to exposure to tapeworms.

Enterovirus D68 caused hundreds of hospitalizations and five deaths across the US in 2014. It left many mysteries, including why so many people got it since a CDC study showed the US populace is basically immune the virus, one discovered in 1962. Why it was linked to paralysis in some children is also unclear. But three experts at ID Week 2015 today agreed, EV-D68 will be back.

Overuse of urinary catheters is a common problem in all hospitals. Intervention is possible.

A University of Colorado School of Medicine hypothesized that the nasal microbiome could be protective against MRSA colonization in some individuals. Reporting at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA, Mary Bessenden, MD and colleges looked at 26 persistently MRSA colonized people and 26 non-colonized controls.

Hospital-associated infections can be better identified and contained through technology, a multi-institutional team reports.

Young suburban heroin users who were admitted recently to a Princeton, NJ drug rehab facility showed an unexpectedly high incidence of hepatitis C infection.

Co-infection with malaria appears to give people who are infected with Ebola virus a better chance of recovering, Scripps Institute researchers found in West Africa.

No one was more shocked than local HIV specialists when an epidemic of HIV hit a small town in Indiana. Diane Janowicz, MD, a Bloomington, Indiana AIDS/HIV specialist gave ID Week attendees a detailed description of how she and other health officials and entities handled the case.

What do you do when you need to test drug therapies for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome but the usual animal subjects do not get the disease? Easy, you just engineer a new kind of mouse.

Ian Crozier, MD, an infectious disease expert working treating Ebola patients in West Africa, had to admit himself to his own emergency treatment unit. His riveting account of his recovery included an episode in which virus lurking in one eye turned it from blue to green. Crozier got a standing ovation in his talk today at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA.

Cats and dogs can be vectors for an eye parasite, a multi-center team in the US Southwest reports. The parasite is called Onchocerca lupi. Six cases, believed to be the first in the US, are reported.

Doctors appear to be overprescribing fluoroquinolones for women with uncomplicated urinary tract infections.

Patients who are morbidly obese need a revised dosing protocol when getting vancomycin.

Canadian researchers found a "troubling trend" in an increase in dentists prescribing antibiotics to patients.

Even when staph bacteria are not drug resistant, clinicians face prescribing drugs that could cause an adverse reaction including kidney injury. A Pittsburgh team looked at the comparative risk of nafcillin vs. oxacillin.

Adding to research confirming the risk of administering piperacillin/tazobactam in combination with vancomycin, two research teams report that it does not matter whether the drugs are given in an extended infusion or standard infusion.

Vancomycin in combination with Beta-Lactams can cause acute kidney injury, and some combinations are worse than others, researchers warn.

California's Gov. Jerry Brown signed a controversial law permitting physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs in cases where a patient has six months or less to live.