It’s time to develop more effective ways to control and prevent sexually transmitted gut infections, urge the authors of an article appearing today in Clinical Microbiology Reviews, a journal of the American Society of Microbiology. Global emergence of several multidrug-resistant gut pathogens and the potential for crossover transmissions among different at-risk populations underscores the importance of prompt diagnosis, appropriate treatment, and the need to consider community-level education and testing.

To solve a problem, we have to see it clearly. Whether it’s an infection by a novel virus or memory-stealing plaques forming in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, visualizing disease processes in the body is the first step toward alleviating human suffering. It’s also often the most difficult and costly. But an artificial intelligence (AI) breakthrough by Virginia Tech computer scientists published Sept. 16 in Cell Systems — a high-impact journal dedicated to biological research — is bringing those fog-bound processes into focus.

As zoonotic diseases like avian flu and COVID-19 continue to threaten both human and wildlife populations, a new study introduces an innovative framework for disease detection—using wild animals themselves as sentinels. By equipping wildlife with biologging devices that track movement and behavior in near-real-time, researchers can detect early signs of illness, monitor disease spread, and inform public health interventions before outbreaks reach crisis levels. The study outlines six key applications of this approach and calls for global collaboration across health, conservation, and environmental sectors to make biologging-based surveillance a central tool in the fight against future pandemics.

Every three seconds, one life is lost to sepsis, according to the Global Sepsis Alliance. It is a life-threatening, dysregulated immune response to infection and remains a leading cause of death worldwide. Most of these deaths are preventable with timely intervention.

Conventional culturing diagnostic methods are often slow and imprecise. The advancement of metagenomic and targeted next-generation sequencing (mNGS and tNGS) now provides rapid precision diagnostics, enabling earlier treatment.