166 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 systematic review and meta-analysis of 36 studies involving over 10,000 children demonstrates that while nasopharyngeal swabs remain the reference standard, nasal and oral sample types offer comparable diagnostic accuracy for respiratory viruses with significantly better tolerability, supporting their adoption as viable alternatives in pediatric care.
This prospective study in Vietnam demonstrates that undetected isoniazid resistance in rifampin-susceptible tuberculosis patients drastically increases the risk of acquiring rifampin resistance by approximately 100-fold, suggesting that routine isoniazid susceptibility testing could significantly reduce the future burden of rifampin-resistant TB.
Five years after receiving the rVSV-ZEBOV-GP vaccine during the 2018 Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a longitudinal study of 1,081 individuals demonstrated that the majority retained sustained detectable anti-EBOV GP antibodies, with response durability varying by prior exposure history and booster administration.
This pragmatic stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial in Pakistan demonstrates that an AI-guided targeting strategy (MATCH-AI) significantly improves the yield of bacteriologically confirmed tuberculosis during active case-finding camps compared to conventional site-selection methods, particularly in rural districts and areas with moderate baseline yields.
This study of 45 Long COVID patients and matched controls found that while salivary hormone levels and viral shedding patterns did not differ significantly between groups, higher salivary HHV-6 DNA levels were positively associated with increased Long COVID symptom severity, anxiety, and depression.
This paper presents a multiscale ODE model of the 2026 Andes virus outbreak on the MV Hondius that identifies a critical immunopathological feedback loop as the driver of fatal cytokine storms, proposing a Wasserstein-based early-warning score and exogenous IL-10 supplementation as the most effective intervention to prevent vascular permeability failure.
This paper introduces a novel classification-based framework for evaluating wastewater-based surveillance as an event-detection system, demonstrating that a Bayesian exponential growth model substantially outperforms traditional methods in reliably identifying SARS-CoV-2 outbreak onsets and epidemic peaks across 281 U.S. counties.
This systematic review and meta-analysis synthesizes evidence on multi-organ post-acute sequelae across major respiratory and Aedes-borne diseases, revealing that infant RSV infection significantly increases asthma risk and dengue fever elevates risks for various neurological, psychiatric, autoimmune, and cardiovascular conditions, while highlighting substantial heterogeneity in study designs that limits broader comparability.
This retrospective study of over 320,000 adult drug-sensitive tuberculosis patients in Maharashtra, India, utilized programmatic data to identify that increasing age, male gender, lower body weight, comorbidities (HIV and diabetes), and substance use are significant predictors of both unfavorable treatment outcomes and mortality.
This study reveals that while pneumococcal conjugate vaccination triggers broad memory B cell expansion in peripheral blood, the germinal center response in lymph nodes is antigenically restricted to a limited number of specificities, suggesting that antigenic competition and extrafollicular responses play critical roles in adult immunity to multivalent vaccines.