(Photo credit: Destiny Pharma www.destinypharma.com) 
Researchers at UK’s Destiny Pharma believe they have developed a drug which can destroy the most virulent strains of MRSA.  They are testing the drug code named XF-73 in the hope it can be used in hospitals by 2011.
Study results of the new drug, which is applied as a gel into patients’ noses, showed methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (MRSA) did not develop resistance to the compound despite being exposed to it 55 times.
Elaine Warburton  www.geneticsandhealth.com

(Photo credit: Flu viruses among cilia – National Geographic magazine http://www.nationalgeographic.com/)
US scientists have discovered a possible reason why the flu virus is seasonal and tends to infect people mostly in the winter. It has a jacket that melts in the summer causing the virus to die off, and stays hard in the winter, until it enters a host where it melts and gets to work. The discovery could lead to new ways to prevent and treat the flu.
Neuroscientist Joshua Zimmerberg and colleagues, based at the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics (LCMB) in the National Institute of Child Health and …read more

Further to my various articles on our ancestry, differences in gene expression levels between people of European versus African ancestry appear to affect how each group responds to certain drugs or fights off specific infections, report researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center and the Expression Research Laboratory at Affymetrix Inc. of Santa Clara, CA.
The researchers used lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from blood from 180 healthy individuals. They studied 60 nuclear families, including mother, father and child. Thirty of the families were Caucasians from Utah and 30 were Yorubans from Ibadan, Nigeria.
Mainly focusing on cancer treatments, the researcher sought to understand …read more