The sneaky meningococcus is a bacterium that can cause terrible disease. Development of an effective vaccine has been extremely difficult. Meningococcal vaccines developed in the 1990s are based on bacterial capsule, shield protects bacteria and used to instruct our body combat this These work against four types meningococcus: A, C, W, Y. However, they do not B. Scientists had invent completely...

Bacterial polysaccharides have numerous clinical or industrial uses. Recombinant plants could offer the possibility of producing bacterial polysaccharides on a large scale and free of contaminating bacterial toxins and antigens. We investigated the feasibility of this proposal by cloning and expressing the gene for the type 3 synthase (cps3S) of Streptococcus pneumoniae in Nicotinia tabacum, us...

A form of runt disease has been produced in neonatal CF-1 and ICR mice by the repeated injection of 10(9) washed, autoclaved, saline-suspended staphylococci or streptococci. The most severely affected animals showed a marked decrease in lymphoid tissues and resembled grossly and microscopically animals suffering from the classical runt or wasting disease described by others. The timing of the i...

Bacterial infections of the genital tract (gonorrhea, chlamydia, chancroid, syphilis) are common and cause significant morbidity. Their importance is heightened by recent appreciation of their roles in facilitation of transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Each is capable of causing repeated infections, suggesting lack of permanent broadly effective immunity. An effective vacci...

Prior to the introduction of vaccines, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) was the most important bacterial pathogen in early childhood, responsible for the majority of cases of meningitis and epiglottitis and contributing to the burden of cases of bacteremia, septic arthritis, pneumonia, and pericarditis . Beginning in 1992, all provinces and territories routinely immunized infants 2 months of...

The majority of studies focused on the construction and reengineering of bacterial pathogens have mainly relied on the knocking out of virulence factors or deletion/mutation of amino acid residues to then observe the microbe's phenotype and the resulting effect on the host immune response. These knockout bacterial strains have also been proposed as vaccines to combat bacterial disease. Theoreti...

Vaccines are among most victorious and gainful public health strategies for averting deadly communicable disease. Thus far, most of the accessible immunization programs reached children younger than 5 years which have effectively reduced worldwide infant and child death. Consequently; thousands of adults and hundreds of children still die every year in the earth from vaccinepreventable serious ...

Pertussis is a bacterial disease that is transmitted very efficiently from human to human by droplets. It occurs at any age, is endemic in any population, and can cause outbreaks in highly variable frequencies. Hallmark of the disease is cough with or without paroxysms, whoop, and vomiting. Diagnosis relies on clinical suspicion followed by laboratory confirmation (PCR, Serology) and should be ...

1. In general, HIV-1 infected individuals should not receive any live viral or bacterial vaccines (eg. Measles/Mumps/Rubella, monovalent Rubella, BCG, yellow fever, oral Typhoid Ty21a, varicella-zoster, oral Polio, vaccinia). There have been instances of lethal infections with live vaccinia vaccines following vaccination of HIV-infected persons.(3) This principle however applies particularly to...

Identification and prioritisation of candidate antigens on which novel vaccines can be based, or the efficacy of existing vaccines improved, are critically dependent on characterising the strategies utilised by microbial pathogens to evade host defences, and, in particular, the key virulence factors involved. In this review, we have focused on the immune evasion strategies utilised by two impor...