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Dr. A. Zuger's NYTimes column presents an excellent discussion of penicillin allergies, both real, exaggerated, and severe and how to deal with them.

You d have to be living under a rock to miss the news that antibiotic resistance is a major public health problem that threatens to set us back to square one in terms of treating bacterial infections. Many practices have been implicated as part of the problem, but there's something new for that list: travel.

As overused as the expression you can t make this up is, sometimes there is simply no other phrase that can do the trick. You decide.
Yesterday, it was Chinese dietary supplements that were in the news. Today it s spices from India. And if there is a better way to illustrate how badly the FDA s hands are tied while trying to protect people from substances they should not be consuming, it isn t obvious.

More than 40 years of AIDS research has led to significant advancements in treatment and prevention. Drugs to treat the infection continued to improve, as did patient outcomes. But now there's another major milestone. Gilead's lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable capsid inhibitor, achieved 100% efficacy in preventing HIV infections in women. For anyone who has followed AIDS over the years, this is simply amazing.

As the horror known as the coronavirus tightens its grip on the world, and a vaccine is years away, our best hope is an antiviral drug that minimizes the damage caused by coronavirus replication. New data on favipiravir, a repurposed drug originally discovered in Japan, looks promising in trials in China. But nothing is ever straightforward in drug discovery -- and that is no different here. Here's a summary of the new findings.

Shane Ellison, the self-proclaimed "People's Chemist," has a lot to say about chemistry, drugs, and vaccines. Let's see if he knows what he's talking about.

Do kids need COVID shots? It's a difficult question to answer, but incendiary commentary has unnecessarily muddied the issue. Let's take a look at what we know so far.

The good news is that African swine fever has nothing to do with swine flu and does not infect humans; the bad news is mostly for pig farmers and ranchers who are facing, as Russian scientists claim, "arguably the most dangerous swine disease worldwide."

Much of the concern about social distancing and the use of masks centers around the airborne transmission of the virus. A recent study looks at how other factors, like temperature and humidity, make COVID-19 more or less viable when it comes to transmission.

Men who have had sex with another man on any occasion since 1977 are currently prohibited from donating blood in the U.S. The ban was instated in 1983 as a response to the higher prevalence of HIV/AIDS among men who have sex with men (MSM) in order to prevent contaminating blood supplies with HIV. However, scientific advances have made the ban seem antiquated and in need of revision. In yesterday s Los Angeles Times, Dr. James P.

Controlling Big Tech, why is infrastructure so expensive to build and maintain, climate migration is altering the diseases we must confront, and a users-guide to breathing.

Yale researchers have discovered a virus that attacks bacteria, also known as bacteriophage (or "phage"), which is capable of infecting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a highly-feared bacterial pathogen.

In yet another cool discovery using nature as a muse, English scientists have found that a foamy cocktail whipped up by Trinidadian frogs during mating may serve as a mode of antibiotic delivery to potentially prevent infections.

When it comes to finding new antibiotics, no place is too weird to look. Three separate teams of researchers have identified potentially useful antibiotics from some of the strangest places imaginable: Sponges, sea snails, and marine worms.

Far too many antibiotic prescriptions are written for infections that cannot be treated by them. A new study published in JAMA shows how some simple behavioral interventions can change prescribers habits toward more evidence-based prescribing.

A Medscape article entitled "Five-Day Course of Oral Antiviral Appears to Stop SARS-CoV-2 in Its Tracks" was recently published. Don't fall for the title. It's not that simple.

The 'Open Science Prize' is a collaboration between three of the biggest sources of science funding around. The intent is to inspire novel ways of making science accessible to aid in public health. The winner - an online tool that will change the course of how viral outbreaks are tracked - was announced this week. 

Sepsis occurs when the body’s response to infection goes into overdrive, leading to tissue damage, organ failure, and death. Sepsis has an overall mortality rate of between 20 and 50 percent, and kills more people than do HIV and breast cancer. It afflicts up to 500,000 people a year in the U.S. and millions more worldwide,.

The origin of life is a profound mystery. Once life arose, natural selection and evolution took over. But the question of how a mixture of various gases created life-giving molecules that arranged into structures capable of reproducing themselves remains unanswered.

The Lancet reports that early drug trial results show great promise for a new antiviral drug combination developed for patients infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV).

Sickle Cell Disease is an awful genetic disease that disproportionally affects black people. It's caused by a single-point mutation in DNA, which results in a modified hemoglobin protein, differing by only one amino acid. While this may sound insignificant, it's anything but. Simple organic chemistry explains why this change profoundly affects those unfortunate enough to inherit the disease, which is characterized by abnormal hemoglobin.

The CDC is again recommending that fully vaccinated Americans mask up in certain circumstances. This is bad advice at odds with the available evidence that will only seed more vaccine hesitancy.

Of all the drugs used to treat herpes, acyclovir is the most common. So, how does it work? The devil is in the details ... and the details are fascinating.

A university professor and two students recreated a virus identical to the one that caused the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. If they can do it, so can terrorists.

When we talk of patient safety, the analogy is often to aviation. But perhaps like commercial flight's problems with baggage, the last little push -- from a very few to never -- is a very steep hurdle.