We are excited to announce that we have matched 4 physicians to the ID Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year! Drs. Briana Castillo, Alex Commanday, John Franzone, and Stephanie Sweitzer will be joining UNC in July.   Dr. Kanthi Vemuri will also be joining us as our 1-year Compromised Host Fellow. We are confident that … Continued

Third year ID fellow Sarah Rutstein, MD, PhD (co-I Farel, Go, Napravnik) was awarded a $50K pilot grant from the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS). NC TraCS supports and funds translational research to improve the health of North Carolina communities. The institute’s Translational Research Matched Pilot Program encourages novel clinical and … Continued

Michael Sciaudone, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at UNC, has won a 2021 postdoctoral fellowship in tropical infectious diseases from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund-American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene (ASTMH). Three of the coveted fellowships are awarded nationally each year, funding research focused on low and low-middle income countries. Sciaudone will use the two-year … Continued

A major tool against malaria in Africa has been the use of rapid diagnostic tests, which have been part of the “test-treat-track” strategy in Ethiopia, the second most-populated country in Africa. But researchers studying blood samples from more than 12,000 individuals in Ethiopia now estimate these tests missed nearly 10% of malaria cases caused by … Continued

CRISPR-based diagnostics are a new class of highly sensitive and specific assays with multiple applications in infectious disease diagnosis. SHERLOCK, or Specific High-Sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter UnLOCKing, is one such CRISPR-based diagnostic that combines recombinase polymerase pre-amplification, CRISPR-RNA base-pairing, and LwCas13a activity for nucleic acid detection. Researchers from the division of infectious diseases recently developed SHERLOCK assays … Continued

Jonathan Parr, MD, MPH, assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases, was interviewed for an article in The Scientist about the development of CRISPR diagnostics. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have been striving to develop low-cost tests to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in patient samples. Now, a team of researchers based … Continued

The NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded UNC’s Marcia Hobbs and Alex Duncan a five-year, $3.9 million grant to study how a vaccine recently developed to prevent life-threatening infections caused by group B Neisseria meningitidis, the MenB vaccine, may also protect people from infection with Neisseria gonorrhoeae, a sexually transmitted bacterial … Continued

Wohl Hopes FDA Approval Will Encourage Vaccinations David Wohl, MD, professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases, talked with WRAL.com about the FDA giving fully approval to Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. “I think this helps for those people who are on the fence,” said Wohl. “Here’s another reason, another thing to think about in … Continued

Nearly one-fifth of the coronavirus infections reported in North Carolina during the first half of August were in people already fully vaccinated, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. A WRAL.com report recognizes that while there is stable and highly effective protection against hospitalizations and severe outcomes for people who are fully … Continued

Myron Cohen, MD, professor of medicine in infectious diseases and director of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, said masks and vaccines remain the best line of defense against Covid in an NBC News story. “You want to prevent any disease you can, rather than treat it, because the consequences of the … Continued

Pay-it-forward programs, whereby someone receives a gift or free service and then gives a gift to another person in return, have expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide an opportunity for healthcare providers to reduce costs, increase uptake of interventions such as testing and vaccines, and promote sustainability. Weiming Tang, PhD, and Joseph Tucker, MD, … Continued

Orange County Schools middle and high school students who are unvaccinated and want to play sports or take part in certain extracurricular activities will need to be tested twice a week for COVID-19. The school board decided in a unanimous vote to require the testing for students who want to be a cheerleader or join the … Continued