A type of sugar found naturally in some women's breast milk may protect new born babies from infection with a potentially life threatening bacterium called Group B streptococcus. These bacteria are a common cause of meningitis in new borns and the leading cause of infection in the first three months of life in the UK and globally.

 The small study involved 183 women in The Gambia and published in the journal Clinical and Translational Immunology, suggests a sugar found in some women's breast milk protect babies against the bacteria. 

Too much cholesterol used to be bad for you. Then some cholesterol was good for you. Now too little cholesterol is bad for you.

A giant chunk of the public no longer trusts science, because scientists have not yet put epidemiology over with the social sciences and the humanities on the credibility scale. Using epidemiology, everything can both cause and prevent cancer.

Blood stem cell transplantation, widely known as bone marrow transplantation, is a powerful technique that potentially can provide a lifelong cure for a variety of diseases. But the procedure is so toxic that it is currently used to treat only the most critical cases.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have come up with a way of conducting the therapy that, in mice, dramatically lowers its toxicity. If the method eventually proves safe and effective for humans, it potentially could be used to cure autoimmune diseases like lupus, juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis; fix congenital metabolic disorders like "bubble boy" disease; and treat many more kinds of cancer, as well as make organ transplants safer and more successful.

WHAT:

Vaccination against a single strain of Zika virus should be sufficient to protect against genetically diverse strains of the virus, according to a study conducted by investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Washington University in St. Louis; and Emory University in Atlanta.

How does Zika get transmitted? In America, it seems to be sex, but in South America it is mosquitoes? While all three vectors are ecologically useless - they could be blasted out of existence with no impact at all anywhere - it is helpful to know which ones are the real culprits.

Researchers have now been able to directly connect the Aedes aegypti mosquito with Zika transmission in the Americas during an outbreak in southern Mexico. 

Despite two generations of prevention, awareness and treatment, gay and bisexual continue to have high levels of HIV infection, a new study led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows. 

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) develops through chromosomal alterations in blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and usually occurs in older persons. Around 20 percent of adults diagnosed with leukemia suffer from this type of blood cancer.

Celiac disease is a rare immune-based condition brought on by the consumption of gluten in genetically susceptible patients. In recent years a larger number of people have stated they are gluten sensitive or even celiac despite lack of a diagnosis, and many dismissed that as the nocebo effect - people who give up something harmless and feel better, the opposite of people who take something harmless and feel better, a placebo. They argued that people who were embracing it because of pop culture books on wheat.

It's no surprise that the rise of peanut allergies correlates to the rise in helicopter parenting. Where kids once built up immunity by getting dirty and eating the foods their parents, a subset of modern parents schedule play dates, buy antibacterial soap and believe that breast milk has "otherworldly power."