242 papers
Infectious diseases represent one of the most dynamic frontiers in global health, covering everything from seasonal flu outbreaks to emerging viral threats that cross borders. This field focuses on how pathogens spread, how our immune systems respond, and the strategies scientists use to stop infections before they become epidemics. Because the science moves fast, waiting for traditional publication often means missing critical insights that could save lives.
At Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from medRxiv to ensure you see the latest findings the moment they appear. Our team transforms these raw studies into both accessible plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries, bridging the gap between complex research and public understanding. Below are the latest papers in infectious diseases, updated daily with fresh insights from the global research community.
This study characterizes a multi-site UK outbreak of blaNDM-positive Enterobacterales driven by the clonal expansion of *Klebsiella pneumoniae* ST101 and the horizontal spread of IncHI2/IncHI2A plasmids across multiple bacterial species, underscoring the critical need for linked surveillance systems to track infections across fragmented healthcare settings.
This study demonstrates that the combination of severe immunocompromise and prolonged SARS-CoV-2 shedding exceeding 21 days significantly accelerates the accumulation of random, genome-wide mutations within the host, highlighting the critical need for intensive antiviral strategies to limit shedding duration in this vulnerable population to mitigate the risk of novel variant emergence.
By analyzing longitudinal neutralising antibody data from over 1,600 unvaccinated, HIV-uninfected individuals in Malawi, this study reveals rapid antibody waning, significant regional and variant-specific differences in infection dynamics, and the prevalence of reinfections, highlighting the limitations of prior immunity and the critical need for vaccination and improved surveillance in sub-Saharan Africa.
This register-based cross-sectional study in South Benin reveals that metronidazole is the second most prescribed antibiotic in primary care, with its usage significantly higher in private facilities and strongly associated with digestive, genitourinary, and skin symptoms, while being less common for fever, respiratory issues, or malaria.
This paper presents a data-driven methodology to quantify the strength of symptom propagation in infectious diseases, demonstrating through synthetic and real-world COVID-19 data that secondary cases are 12–17% more likely to develop symptoms if their primary case is symptomatic, while confirming that these estimates remain robust against reporting biases and age-dependent factors.
A study of 457 children in Kilifi, Kenya, found that a predictive model combining a wide range of protein biomarkers and clinical data failed to accurately differentiate between bacterial and viral pneumonia, yielding an inadequate Area Under the Curve of 0.61.
This study utilizes spatial proteomics to reveal that, regardless of whether the mycetoma pathogen is bacterial or fungal, the tissue microenvironment immediately surrounding the pathogen grains forms a conserved immunosuppressive niche characterized by the accumulation of CD66b+ARG1+VISTA+ cells, thereby facilitating pathogen persistence.
Using the OpenSAFELY platform, researchers developed and validated specific and sensitive computable phenotypes to accurately classify respiratory syncytial virus, influenza, and COVID-19 cases in English electronic health records, demonstrating their alignment with surveillance data while highlighting varying misclassification risks based on phenotype specificity and patient age.
This single-facility observational study in a Japanese long-term care facility demonstrates that self-reported and monitoring-based contact records exhibit distinct discrepancy patterns compared to ultra-wideband sensor data, suggesting that contact identification strategies should be tailored to specific facility workflows rather than relying on a single universal proximity threshold.
This retrospective cohort study of over 65,000 U.S. adults using All of Us data found that long COVID risk is significantly associated with demographic factors and pre-infection health status but is not driven by the mere presence of pre-existing symptoms or functional impairments, suggesting that long COVID represents a distinct change from an individual's baseline health.