Nature reports that the Centers for Disease Control have ceased all shipments of infectious disease pathogens until they can get them shipped right:

Workers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, accidentally shipped highly dangerous H5N1 influenza virus to another government laboratory in March, the agency revealed today. The [...]

The Verge is rolling out the red carpet to welcome back the clap:

…[P]enicillin and various tetracyclines have all stopped working against the most prevalent strains. This means that today’s gonorrhea patient has very few treatment options left.

…

Unfortunately, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) thinks that emerging resistant strains will one day take [...]

Discover Magazine tries to put the record straight, revealing that the supposedly septic-mouthed Komodo dragons have been getting a bad rap:

But of all the terrible tales told about these dragons, none has been so persistent and pervasive than that of their bite. The mouths of Komodos are said to be laden with deadly bacteria [...]

SONG: “Starts Beating” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Scientists build a biological pacemaker by injecting a modified virus into the heart”, io9.com, 17 December 2012, as used in the post “Virus rebuilds unhealthy hearts.”

ABSTRACT: I like thinking about the metaphor of hearts being broken, [...]

Sci-News reveals one more weapon in the war on carnivores – tick bites that

Nature echoes the call for the National Institutes of Health to create a humane retirement plan for their primate research assistants:

Last December, a report from the US Institute of Medicine concluded that most chimpanzee research was scientifically unnecessary and recommended that the NIH sharply curtail its support. The agency has since set up [...]

Scientific American’s “Science Sushi” blog rolls up some recent research connecting cat-parasite Toxoplasma gondii with human suicides:

in Denmark, serum antibody levels for Toxoplasma gondii were taken from the children of over 45,000 women as a part of a neonatal screening study to better understand how the parasite is transmitted from mother to [...]

New Scientist makes one more argument for breast-feeding, with research that shows breast milk seems to wipe out the virus that causes AIDS:

Previous research had hinted at breast milk’s antiviral properties, but it was unclear if they would prevent transmission of HIV. “We have shown that milk has an intrinsic innate ability to [...]

Discover launches a thousand new phobia cases with their expose (and I cannot do better than their headline here) Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms in the Brain:

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live [...]