“Microbiology” on The Daily Caller

BOSTON (AP) — A blood test so sensitive that it can spot a single cancer cell lurking among a billion healthy ones is moving one step closer to being available at your doctor’s office. (more)

The swine flu virus that swept the world last year causing a global health emergency has returned to claim the lives of 10 adults in the UK in the past six weeks. (more)

The first organism able to substitute one of the six chemical elements crucial to life has been found. (more)

Bureaucrats have thankless jobs, always under attack for some horrible decision or another they’re making or choice to the public they’re limiting, and justifiably so. This is not a defense of bureaucrats, they’re deserving of almost every criticism that comes their way. This is to point out yet another way in which bureaucrats could limit options for you and your family through their ever-growing control over our health care. (more)

Got a funny feeling in your nether-region but too embarrassed to ask your doctor what it might be? If a group of British researchers have their way, your mobile phone will soon be able to tell you if you’ve got an STD. (more)

Hard cases make bad law, but bad law too makes hard cases. We’ll see that today when the Supreme Court tries parsing the opaque National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act of 1986 to determine whether it pre-empts state law “design defect” suits brought against vaccine manufacturers. One of four pre-emption cases the Court has taken so far this term, Bruesewitz v. Wyeth is likely a portent of litigation to come if ObamaCare isn’t repealed — once we find out what’s in it. (more)

Another woman has come forward accusing former baseball great Roberto Alomar of having unprotected sex with her even though he’s HIV-positive — and this time, it’s his wife. (more)

U.S. government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago. (more)

Amid a rolling landscape of browning chaparral and battered trailers, Alan and Ryan Armstrong’s metal henhouses line up like military barracks. Keeping their 450,000 birds safe — and Salmonella enteritidis out of their henhouses — is a daily battle. (more)

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has revealed a previously unknown type of oil-eating bacteria, which is suddenly flourishing. (more)

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat. (more)

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat. (more)

As intravenous antibiotics dripped into his arm, David Carmody seemed to be recovering nicely from a bad bladder infection. But then out of the blue things got worse as he lay in bed at a rehabilitation center: He felt weaker and began suffering uncontrollable diarrhea. (more)

Food and Drug Administration chief Margaret Hamburg said Monday her agency is limited by law to a mostly reactive stance on food safety and argued that it needs a more “preventive approach.” (more)

The over-50s infection rate in England, Wales and Northern Ireland more than doubled in under a decade – from 299 new cases in 2000 to 710 in 2007. (more)

The White House on Tuesday unveiled President Obama’s national strategy for combating HIV/AIDS, which aims to curb infections by 25 percent in the next five years by focusing resources on demographic groups that are most at risk. (more)

HIV research is undergoing a renaissance that could lead to new ways to develop vaccines against the AIDS virus and other viral diseases. (more)

A new computer program is decoding influenza and could unravel other viruses as well. The research could save millions of people around the world from death by not only influenza, but eventually other diseases as well. (more)

California is facing what could be the state’s biggest outbreak of pertussis since 1958, according to its top public health official. This contagious disease is more commonly known as whooping cough due the distinctive whoop that occurs when sufferers cough and gasp for breath. (more)

Researchers at the University’s Department of Chemistry have discovered a way of transforming the chemical compound polyvinyl-alcohol (PVA), which is a key element of television sets with liquid crystal display (LCD) technology, into an anti-microbial substance that destroys infections such as Escherichia coli and some strains of Staphylococcus aureus. (more)