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Scientists say continuous monitoring of the cholera bug genome is key to preventing outbreaks of new variants.

Diphtheria – a relatively easily-preventable infection – is evolving to become resistant to a number of classes of antibiotics and in future could lead to vaccine escape, warn researchers from the UK and India.

Researchers have developed a DNA test to quickly identify secondary infections in COVID-19 patients, who have double the risk of developing pneumonia while on ventilation than non-COVID-19 patients.

In late 2019, a new institute opened on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Its timing could not have been better - as the COVID-19 pandemic sent Britain into lockdown several months later, the institute found itself at the heart of the ̽��ֱ��’s response to this unprecedented challenge.

Vaccine expert Professor Gordon Dougan looks at the challenges of developing and delivering a vaccine against COVID-19.

“In many parts of the world people still live with the daily threat of diseases like cholera, typhoid, and malaria. In reality COVID is just another infection,” says Professor Gordon Dougan.

One of Cambridge’s newest institutes, established to study the relationship between infectious disease and our immune systems, is leading the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 150 scientists and clinicians, the UK’s largest academic Containment Level 3 Facility, and a range of collaborators from across the UK and beyond. 

Over the past 70 years richer nations have gradually lost their sense of danger concerning epidemics and serious infections, writes Professor Gordon Dougan. We must now reacquire this instinctive memory.

Trevor Lawley and Gordon Dougan are bug hunters, albeit not the conventional kind. ̽��ֱ��bugs they collect are invisible to the naked eye. And even though we’re teeming with them, researchers are only beginning to discover how they keep us healthy – and how we could use these bugs as drugs.