COVID-19 & other Diseases

Stay up to date on the latest COVID-19 research as it happens, get help and support others, and contribute to the research the international community is using to combat the current crisis.

The global crisis surrounding the novel coronavirus 2019–nCoV, commonly known as the COVID-19 coronavirus, is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. It has affected the lives and the work of people around the world, including chemists. Yet chemists are also at the forefront of the fight to understand, contain, treat, and eventually defeat the disease. […]

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is an acute infectious disease that spreads mainly via the respiratory route. A distinct coronavirus (SARS‐CoV) has been identified as the aetiological agent of SARS. Recently, a metallopeptidase named ...

The unwavering spread of COVID-19 has taken the world by storm. Preventive measures like social distancing and mask usage have been taken all around the globe but still, as of September 2020, the number of cases continues to rise in many countries. Evidently, ...

When it comes to critically ill patients with COVID-19, some physicians say that ventilators may be doing more harm than good.

We evaluated an eye-nose goggle to determine its usefulness in reducing nosocomial RSV infection in patients and staff members on our infant ward. During a community outbreak of RSV in 1984, infection was assessed by biweekly routine viral cultures on all ward personnel and patients and also by...

Every year, lives are lost because of the spread of hospital infections. Read about the preventive steps you can take, such as proper handwashing

Biosafety, facility hygiene and the latest breakthroughs in the disinfection and sanitation industries.

Books, papers and statistics on impacts on and solutions for our lives and our societies – and what are some of the solutions to boost our healthcare systems, secure our businesses, maintain our jobs and education, and stabilise financial markets and economies?

General COVID resources nationally and internationally.

Restaurants remain hardest hit, permanent and temporary closures increase

Combining the aforementioned antimicrobial contact-killing properties of copper, the anti-adhesion properties of polymeric micelles and the release-kill abilities of chlorine dioxide (ClO2), Li et al. [47] developed a multifunctional coating viricidal for influenza virus H1N1.

Companies the world over are directing their ingenuity at the fight against the coronavirus. Here are the front-runners, from sanitising robots to a 3D-printed hospital ward

Vitamin D generates many extraskeletal effects due to the vitamin D receptor (VDR) which is present in most tissues throughout the body. The possible role of vitamin D in infections is implied from its impact on the innate and adaptive immune responses. ...

Officials have been considering whether to recommend face coverings be worn in public because of increasing evidence that infected people without symptoms can spread the infection, according to internal memos and new guidance provided to the White House by the CDC.

The metaphor doesn’t capture free speech’s most fundamental function: Freedom of speech gives you a fighting chance to know the world as it really is.

We demonstrated that during colonization with Streptococcus pneumoniae the nasal mucosal tissues of mice support two populations of pneumococci. Transparent-phase pneumococci can be readily washed from the outer surface, while a second population composed ...

{Current COVID-19 related developments and news}

A SARS-CoV-2 variant carrying the Spike protein amino acid change D614G has become the most prevalent form in the global pandemic. Dynamic tracking of variant frequencies revealed a recurrent pattern of G614 increase at multiple geographic levels: national, ...

****!!!!*** "Chlorine Dioxide caused great variability in the inactivation kinetics between viruses and was the only treatment that did not induce genome damage... ClO2 rapidly degraded the capsid proteins of all three viruses. Protein composition alone could not explain the observed degradation trends; instead, molecular dynamics simulations indicated that degradation is dictated by the solvent-accessible surface area of individual amino acids. Finally, despite the similarities of the three viruses investigated, *****their mode of inactivation by a single disinfectant varied. This explains why closely related viruses can exhibit drastically different inactivation kinetics."

2012. by Norio Ogata. Airborne influenza virus infection of mice can be prevented by gaseous chlorine dioxide (ClO2). This study demonstrated that ClO2 abolished the function of the haemagglutinin (HA) of influenza A virus (H1N1) in a concentration-, time- and temperature-dependent manner. The IC50 during a 2 min reaction with ClO2 at 25 °C was 13.7 µM, and the half-life time of HA with 100 µM ClO2 at 25 °C was 19.5 s. Peptides generated from a tryptic digest of ClO2-treated virus were analysed by mass spectrometry. An HA fragment, 150NLLWLTGK157 was identified in which the tryptophan residue (W153) was 32 mass ...

************** by Norio Ogata

Nosocomial lower respiratory tract infections are a common cause of morbidity and mortality in ICU patients receiving mechanical ventilation. Many studies have investigated the management and prevention of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), but few have focused on the role of ventilator-associat …

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