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Pneumonia kills more children under 5 years of age than any other infectious disease, but affordable and effective treatment and prevention measures are available. The time has come for the world to wake up to this forgotten killer.
Nearly one-third of the world's population is infected withMycobacterium tuberculosis. In this Review, Young and colleagues describe the different forms the infection can take, how imaging techniques can help us understand the range of infections and how these findings can be used for drug discovery approaches.
Photo-oxidative stress caused by singlet oxygen, a type of reactive oxygen species that is generated by energy transfer to molecular oxygen, can damage cellular components, leading to cell death. In this Review, Donohue and Ziegelhoffer describe the recent advances made in characterizing the bacterial response mechanisms to photo-oxidative stress.
The emergence of drug-resistantPlasmodiumparasites has made the treatment of malaria difficult in some areas. One of the last drugs to which there is no full resistance is artemisinin. Fidock and Eastman describe artemisinin-based combination therapies that aim to decrease the occurrence of drug resistance and that have raised the possibility of malaria eradication.
In fungi, nuclei move in a microtubule- and microtubule motor-dependent manner. In this Review, Judith Berman and Amy Gladfelter discuss how fungi use the movement of intact nuclei within and between cells to control the integrity, ploidy and assortment of specific genomes or individual chromosomes.
The increase in allergic diseases that has occurred in developing countries in recent years has been attributed to a decrease in exposure to the microorganisms in the environment. Blaser and Falkow reflect that this increase, as well as the ongoing obesity epidemic and increased susceptibility to infectious disease, might instead be the result of changes in the human microbiota.
Efforts to monitor the range of infectious diseases that affect international travellers and the factors that determine infection rates will provide an evidence base from which more effective preventative measures can be developed. Torresi and Leder review the main findings of one such effort, the GeoSentinel surveillance network.