Typhoid fever, caused by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S. Typhi), is a major health problem especially in developing countries. Vaccines against typhoid are commonly used by travelers but less so by residents of endemic areas. The researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) typing to investigate the population structure of 372 S. Typhi isolated during a typhoid disease burden study and Vi vaccine trial in Kolkata, India.

Questions have been raised about the transparency and scientific quality of regulatory processes applied in the first open field releases of genetically modified (GM) insects, and there is concern that inappropriate precedents have been set, particularly through generic risk assessments covering multiple species and technologies.

After many years of open discussion and development, the first genetically modified (GM) insect strains are entering field trials. A key engineered trait renders the insects “genetically sterile”, such that some or all of their offspring die; the insects additionally carry a fluorescent marker gene for easy identification. Such “genetic sterility” transgenes (in genetic terms, conditional dominant lethal genes) are not able to establish or spread in the wild due to their high fitness cost; such self-limiting strategies are widely viewed as the lowest risk category.

Experimental releases of genetically modified (GM) insects are reportedly being evaluated in various countries, including Brazil, the Cayman Islands (United Kingdom), France, Guatemala, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the United States of America, and Vietnam. GM mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) have already been released for field trials into inhabited areas in the Cayman Islands (2009–?), Malaysia (2010–2011), and Brazil (2011–2012).

Insects are the pre-eminent form of metazoan life on land, with as many as 1018 individuals alive at any one instant and over three-quarters of a million species described. Although it is estimated that there are as many as 14,000 species that are blood feeders, only three to 400 species regularly attract our attention. Some of these are of immense importance to us, as vector-borne diseases still form a huge burden on both the human population and our domesticated animals.

A multinational, prospective clinical study was carried out in South-East Asia (SEA) and Latin America (LA), to ascertain the proportion of inapparent dengue infections in households of febrile dengue cases, and to compare clinical data and biological markers from subjects with various dengue disease patterns. Dengue infection was laboratory-confirmed during the acute phase, by virus isolation and detection of the genome. The four participating reference laboratories used standardized methods.

Recent clusters of outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases (Rift Valley fever and chikungunya) in Africa and parts of the Indian Ocean islands illustrate how interannual climate variability influences the changing risk patterns of disease outbreaks. Although Rift Valley fever outbreaks have been known to follow periods of above-normal rainfall, the timing of the outbreak events has largely been unknown. Similarly, there is inadequate knowledge on climate drivers of chikungunya outbreaks.

Post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL) is a cutaneous complication appearing after treatment of visceral leishmaniasis, and PKDL patients are considered infectious to sand flies and may therefore play a role in the transmission of VL. We estimated the risk and risk factors of PKDL in patients with past VL treatment in south-eastern Nepal.

Previous studies on the influence of weather on Aedes aegypti dynamics in Puerto Rico suggested that rainfall was a significant driver of immature mosquito populations and dengue incidence, but mostly in the drier areas of the island. We conducted a longitudinal study of Ae. aegypti in two neighborhoods of the metropolitan area of San Juan city, Puerto Rico where rainfall is more uniformly distributed throughout the year. We assessed the impacts of rainfall, temperature, and human activities on the temporal dynamics of adult Ae. aegypti and oviposition.

There is growing interest in the scientific community, health ministries, and other organizations to control and eventually eliminate neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Control efforts require reliable maps of NTD distribution estimated from appropriate models and survey data on the number of infected people among those examined at a given location. This kind of data is often available in the literature as part of epidemiological studies. However, an open-access database compiling location-specific survey data does not yet exist.