Metabolic health (normal blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, among other factors) influences the effectiveness of influenza vaccinations. Vaccination is known to be less effective in people with obesity compared to those with a healthier body mass index (BMI), but St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have found it is not obesity itself, but instead metabolic dysfunction, which makes the difference. In a study publishedin Nature Microbiology, the researchers found switching obese mice to a healthy diet before flu vaccination, but not after, completely protected the ..read more

Delays in receiving vaccinations lead to greater vaccine-preventable disease risk. Timeliness of receipt of recommended vaccinations is not routinely tracked in the U.S., either overall or for populations that have known barriers to accessing routine health care, including lower-income families and children. Newcomer, et al. (2024) sought to measure vaccination timeliness among U.S. children aged 0 to 19 months, overall and by socioeconomic indicators. This serial, cross-sectional study analyzed nationally representative data from the 2011 to 2021 National Immunization Survey–Child (NIS-Child ..read more

New research being presented at this year’s ESCMID Global Congress (formerly ECCMID) in Barcelona, Spain (27-30 April) suggests that the free-to-use, widely accessible ChatGPT could be an effective tool to help reduce vaccine hesitancy among the general public, as well as providing helpful advice on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in conjunction with sexual health clinics, by improving knowledge and access to care. “Our findings showed that ChatGPT displayed a remarkable ability to accurately respond to a wide breadth of commonly asked questions, encompassing topics such as misconcepti ..read more

Recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) can be prevented for up to nine years in more than half of people given an oral spray-based vaccine and is a potential alternative to antibiotic treatments, finds research. Initial results from the first long-term follow-up study of the safety and effectiveness of the MV140 vaccine for recurrent UTIs are presented this weekend at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris. They show that in both men and women with recurrent UTIs, 54% of study participants remained UTI-free for nine years after the vaccine, with no notable side effects ..read more

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a Health Alert Network (HAN) Health Advisory to inform clinicians, state health departments, and the public of a recently confirmed human infection with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) virus in the United States following exposure to presumably infected dairy cattle. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently reported detections of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) virus in U.S. dairy cattle in multiple states. This Health Advisory also includes a summary of interim CDC recommendations for prevent ..read more

On June 21, 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the first respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines for adults aged 60 years and older using shared clinical decision-making. Understanding the severity of RSV disease in adults can help guide this clinical decision-making. Surie, et al. (2024) sought to describe disease severity among adults hospitalized with RSV and compare it with the severity of COVID-19 and influenza disease by vaccination status. In this cohort study, adults aged 18 years and older admitted to the hospital with acute respiratory illness and la ..read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruptions to everyday life and has had social, political, and financial consequences that will persist for years, say Rocha and Solha, et al. (2024). Several initiatives with intensive use of technology were quickly developed in this scenario; however, technologies that enhance epidemiological surveillance in contexts with low testing capacity and healthcare resources are scarce, they add. This study aimed to address this gap by developing a data science model that uses routinely generated healthcare encounter records to detect possible new outbr ..read more

A new study in Health Data Science introduces an advanced research framework to dissect the vast textual landscape surrounding COVID-19. This methodology leverages keywords from Google Trends alongside research abstracts from the WHO COVID-19 database, offering a nuanced understanding of the pandemic's discourse dynamics. Throughout the pandemic, research has underpinned effective policy-making, yet tools like Google Trends (GT) often miss critical nuances captured in scholarly investigations. This study juxtaposes GT data with academic research, illuminating the breadth and depth of scientif ..read more

In their research article published in Eurosurveillance, von Schreeb et al. challenge existing assumptions regarding the relationship between the use of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and the incidence of bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STI). According to the concept of sexual risk compensation, the start of PrEP treatment – a drug regimen which effectively prevents acquiring HIV – is associated with rises in STI as people feel protected against HIV while using it. However, von Schreeb et al. argue that available studies that have looked into the empirical foundation for the c ..read more

A new study published today in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) demonstrates the use of a simple pre-surgical infection prevention protocol to prevent dangerous post-surgical infections. Researchers performed this investigation at the Soroka University Medical Center in Israel. Surgical site infections (SSIs) are a type of healthcare-associated infection with deadly consequences for some patients. According to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 110,000 SSIs linked to inpatient surgeries in the U.S. in 2015.1 These infectio ..read more