Category: Infectious Diseases

Sean Connelly shares how a small‑town upbringing, a passion for community, and early research experiences led him to pursue a career dedicated to improving global health. Now an MD‑PhD student at the UNC School of Medicine, Connelly studies malaria drug resistance in East Africa, working with international partners to support...

Dr. Scott Commins, a member of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, commented on the death of a 47-year-old man from Alpha-Gal Syndrome in an NBC News story. Dr. Commins studies the tick-bite induced red meat allergy that affects a growing population and describes the biggest risk factors for severe reactions, such as...

Artemisinin partial resistance, driven by Plasmodium falciparum K13 mutations, threatens malaria control. Zanzibar is vulnerable to the spread of artemisinin partial resistance but lacks molecular surveillance. Sean Connelly, an MD-PhD candidate, led a study with the IDEEL Lab team that sequenced samples in Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania, collected from 2022 to...

In a recent podcast, The Lone Star Tick & One Patient’s Experience With Ehrlichiosis, Dr. Ron Falk speaks with Dr. Ross Boyce, an expert in tick-borne illnesses, and Dr. Katherine Huffman-Falk, a retired nephrologist who was recently bitten by a tick. This podcast talks about what a tick-borne disease is...

Chemtai Mungo, MD, MPH, FACOG, has been awarded $2.5M over five years by the National Institutes of Health for her research focused on improving human papillomavirus (HPV) treatment outcomes in women living with HIV (WWH) in Africa. Dr. Mungo is an Assistant Professor in the UNC Department of Obstetrics and...

Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine’s International Center for the Advancement of Translational Science, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases have demonstrated the important role of human T cells in controlling RSV infection in the absence of an antibody response. Led by...

Chunyan Li is a social and behavioral researcher in the Department of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Public Health applying socially innovative and community-engaged approaches to promote public health in global settings. For her dissertation, she worked with UNC Project-China to assess barriers to PrEP in the province...

HIV virus eradication is a complex health challenge due to its long-lived persistence and how it hides in latently infected cells that escape the body’s immune system. Effective HIV treatments have decreased the likelihood of someone developing AIDS, while helping individuals live long and healthy lives without transmission to sexual...

The NIAID has awarded Arlene Seña, MD, MPH, a member of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and professor of infectious diseases, $1.9 million to initiate a longitudinal clinical study over 16 months that will advance diagnostic product development for syphilis, with the potential for additional funding over...

Researchers from the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) presented updated results from the HPTN 084 long-acting cabotegravir (CAB) for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) study at the AIDS 2022 conference in Montreal. New findings show reductions in HIV incidence were sustained in the 12 months following trial unblinding (November 5, 2020, through...

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....

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...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) remains endemic throughout sub-Saharan Africa despite the widespread availability of effective childhood vaccines. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, HBV treatment and birth-dose vaccination programs are not established. UNC School of Medicine researchers led a study to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of HBV testing...

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has awarded Ross Boyce, MD, MSc, a 2021 Clinical Scientist Development Award for his research proposal entitled, “Getting malaria off the back of women and children in western Uganda,” which aims at reducing the incidence of malaria among infants and young children in rural Uganda....

HIV-related mortality has decreased since 1996 due to improved treatments and evolving care guidelines, but the extent to which persons entering HIV care have a higher risk for death over the following years, compared with peers in the general population, has been unclear. Joseph Eron, MD, the Herman and Louise...

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 11th among universities globally for its infectious diseases program. The Best Global Universities rankings, now in their seventh year, focus on academic research, publications and citations, international collaboration, and overall reputation. This is the first time infectious...

The year was 1993. Alexis Mwanza, then 17, found himself huddled on top of a train, fleeing violence in his home town in the Democratic Republic of Congo by leading nine of his family members 500 miles away to Mbuji Mayi. As a displaced refugee in that city, Mwanza watched...

Research looks at leveraging diagnostic technology to improve management of pediatric infections in low-resource settings Emily Ciccone, MD, MHS, a UNC clinical instructor and infectious diseases fellow, recently won first prize in the clinical research award session of the 2020 annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and...

  Last week’s authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for emergency use of bamlanivimab feels like a shot in the arm, so to speak, for David Wohl, MD, a UNC infectious diseases physician and researcher. A monoclonal antibody developed by Eli Lilly to treat mild to moderate COVID-19,...

On the heels of FDA authorization of convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19, UNC researchers are conducting a clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of plasma that includes a higher amount of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The new Coronavirus-inactivating Plasma (CoVIP) research clinical trial is designed to...