In January, entomologists will start deploying a strange bacterium called Wolbachia pipientis in an attempt to halt disease transmission by mosquitoes. Their target is Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue, a human viral disease that causes crippling joint and muscle pains. Recent studies have shown that infection with Wolbachia makes mosquitoes resistant to the dengue virus. Now, a team at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, wants to test whether they can spread Wolbachia in the wild by setting free small numbers of mosquitoes infected with the microbe.

Fran

Europe's food safety watchdog on 25 February issued a scientific mass-verdict on more than 400 so-called health claims, the promises that food producers make on their labels and in advertisements, rejecting purported health benefits of a raft of substances.

When World Health Organization (WHO) chief Margaret Chan declared last week that for the first time in more than 40 years the world is facing an influenza pandemic, she simply stated what everybody already knew.

On 27 April, 6 days after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first reported an unusual swine flu outbreak in humans, international agencies were still struggling to determine how serious a threat the virus posed.

According to several worrisome studies presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, resistance against artemisinin-based combination therapies, the gold standard in fighting malaria, seems to be developing in western Cambodia, along the Thai border.

A team of epidemiologists has reported that just one-fifth of the standard meningitis vaccine dose triggers an immune response almost as good as that of the full dose, offering a way to potentially stretch limited supplies.

A new type of ready-to-use food is changing the way severe malnutrition is treated. But questions remain about how far to push its introduction--and science has a hard time providing the answer.

The Asian tiger mosquito is on a rampage. Entomologists are impressed, public health officials are nervous, and many of the rest of us are swatting furiously. How did Aedes albopictus become such a scourge?

It was supposed to prevent blindness and death from vitamin A deficiency in millions of children. But almost a decade after its invention, golden rice is still stuck in the lab.