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Detecting a vast diversity of rainforest animals by swabbing their DNA from leaves
In the context of accelerating rates of global biodiversity loss, tracking changes in wildlife is instrumental to inform adaptive management strategies and conserve biodiversity. At the same time, the majority of emerging infectious diseases have their origins in wild…
Virologist Stephanie Pfänder receives Jürgen Wehland Award
Newly emerging pathogens are major challenges for infection research as they require the swift development of diagnostics, vaccines and antiviral drugs. Emerging viruses are viruses that are new to a population and can occur and spread very rapidly. One such example is…
A human factor
SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the disease COVID-19 with nearly seven million deaths worldwide to date, has a characteristic genetic makeup made entirely of ribonucleic acid (RNA). This RNA contains instructions for creating new copies of the virus. When…
Fabian Leendertz receives the Hamburg Science Award 2023 for One Health
Fabian Leendertz will use the prize money of 100,000 euros for preliminary work in the field of intercultural collaboration as part of One Health Surveillance. In the coming months, a team of anthropologists will work with citizens in the Central African Republic and…
“There will be other, perhaps even more dangerous pandemics”
Early in the pandemic, there was a lack of masks and protective equipment for medical staff. Only insufficient capacities for contact tracing were available to the health authorities. There were bottlenecks in hospitals, lockdowns, school closures followed by the…
“We will not be able to do without conventional antibiotics”
Antibiotics are often the only treatment option for bacterial infections. Generally, however, they have the unfortunate side effect of also killing useful bacteria – for example in the intestine – and thus sometimes disrupting digestion for weeks. For some years now,…
Eva Medina: "It is important to not let bacteria recognise that we are fighting them"
Dr Medina, which options do we have for fighting resistant pathogens? A rational approach to combat multi-resistant bacteria would be the development of new antibiotics that do not belong to the same classes than those currently in use. But this option will only offer a…
The zoo in our intestine
The human intestine is home to around 100 trillion bacteria, which is about ten times the number of cells in our entire body. This internal menagerie, known as the microbiota, weighs at least one kilogram and contains over 500 different species of bacteria. What is…
Diversity is the key
During the COVID 19 pandemic, the vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 did not offer optimal protection. However, a booster vaccination against the same variant or after another infection creates what is known as "hybrid immunity", which generates a much broader protective…