Gates Foundation Pledges $10 Billion for Vaccines for Next Decade

The Bill and Melinda Gates in January pledged $10 billion for the next decade toward the study, development, and delivery of vaccines for the poorest countries. Based on a model developed in part at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the foundation projects this investment could help in preventing 7.6 million deaths among children under 5, with an additional 1.1 million children if a malaria vaccine were made available by 2014. In announcing these new resources, the foundation called for efforts to design immunization programs to better reach those in need, to conduct lab research and clinical trials for new vaccines, to introduce vaccines for pneumonia, severe diarrhea, and other diseases, and to ensure a market for and adequate supply of vaccines in developing countries. More details on the Gates Foundation vaccine program is available online at http: //www.gatesfoundation.org/vaccines/Pages/decade-of-vaccines.aspx.


CDC: H1N1 Influenza, Salmonella Montevideo Outbreaks Are Subsiding

There were as many as 84 million cases of H1N1 influenza, up to 378,000 flu-related hospitalizations, and as many as 17,160 H1N1- related deaths in the United States through mid-January of this year, according to officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga. Infection rates peaked in October and continued to subside during the early weeks of 2010, in contrast with the pattern of seasonal flu that tends to peak between January and March, they noted. Additional waves of H1N1 cases remain a possibility.


Recent Insights about Avenues for Generating Antibiotic Resistance

RNA polymerase in slowly growing Escherichia coli cells can bypass some kinds of damaged sites along DNA, leading to transcriptional mutagenesis, according to Paul Doetsch at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga., and his collaborators. This type of mutagenesis has "important implications," perhaps explaining how "pathogenic microorganisms may acquire resistance to antibiotics," he says. Details appear in the February 12 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0913191107). In a separate development, subjecting either E. coli or Staphylococcus aureus cells to low doses of antibiotics can lead to mutant strains that are sensitive to the applied antibiotic but have cross-resistance to other antibiotics, according to James Collins of Boston University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and his collaborators. The low doses of antibiotics produce reactive oxygen species, which appear to be responsible for mutagenesis. Of several antibiotics tested, ampicillin appears to give rise to the widest range of drug resistances. Details appear in the February 12 Molecular Cell (37:311-320).


V. cholerae: Reservoirs in Fish, Dispersed by Birds, Formed into Biofilms

Fish apparently can serve as intermediate reservoirs for Vibrio cholerae, storing this pathogen in their intestines presumably after consuming copepods and chironomids, according to Malka Halpern at the University of Haifa in Israel and her collaborators. This reservoir of fish thus makes more plausible an earlier assertion from Halpern and collaborators that migratory waterbirds help to disperse the pathogen. Details appear in PLoS ONE 5:e8607. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0008607. In a separate development involving this same pathogen, its protein VpsT appears to serve as a "master regulator," according to Holger Sondermann of the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, N.Y., and his collaborators. In particular, VpsT plays a critical role in sensing the messenger, cyclic di-GMP, and then "facilitating the process" of biofilm formation, he says. Details appear in the February 12 Science (327:866-868).