New Scientist has more on WWI germ that can survive all kinds of modern medicines:

Ernest Cable was a British soldier who died in 1915 from dysentery caught in the trenches of northern France during the first world war. Even if penicillin had been available to treat him, he would still have died because the […]

Science Daily reports on a bug that’ll be keeping some public health officials up nights:

The global initiative to eradicate poliomyelitis through routine vaccination has helped reduce the number of cases by more than 99% in 30 years, from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 650 reported cases in 2011. However, major epidemics […]

Even, Nature explains, from cows that have never been around antibiotics. Something about cow manure runoff helps resistant bacteria grow in the soil:

Because manure itself is known to change the composition of bacterial communities in soil, a team led by microbiologist Jo Handelsman, then at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, decided to […]

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” [Download] (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 […]

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 […]