Posted 20/10/2021. Scrub typhus infects over a million people a year across the Asia-Pacific. The ecology of this important disease, transmitted by chigger mites, remains poorly understood. Ivo Elliott and colleagues report on the identification of key risk factors that determine foci of high disease transmission at 3 sites in Northern Thailand.

Posted 19/10/2021. The search for more effective and affordable treatments for cryptococcal meningitis must go on, as results of a trial repurposing tamoxifen, a drug developed for breast cancer, found it had no effect in a trial in Vietnam, by Nguyen Thi Thuy Ngan and Jeremy Day. Although tamoxifen shows activity against Cryptococcus neoformans in vitro, there was no evidence of benefit in patients. The OUCRU team will keep looking for better treatments for cryptococcosis.

Posted 15/10/2021. Tan Le Van and colleagues showed Delta variant breakthrough infections may cause asymptomatic or mild disease, but are associated with high viral loads and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies. The data suggested ongoing transmission had occurred between fully-vaccinated individuals. Social distancing measures remain critical to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

Posted 01/10/2021. In 2017 hundreds of thousands of ‘Rohingya’ fled from Myanmar to refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Health centre data were reviewed to estimate the increase in health care utilization. The presence of a large migrant population relative to a smaller host community burdens the limited facilities and resources of the public health sector, by Lorenz Von Seidlein and colleagues