News

The names of 56 distinguished individuals elected to become Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) are announced today.
Spanning the arts, business, and science and techno logy sectors, they join the RSE in its work to place the advancement of learning and useful knowledge at the centre of public life in Scotland.

CIIE's Pedro Vale and colleagues from the University of Helsinki have found that plant hosts co-infected with more than one pathogen strain result in more severe epidemics than plants infected with only one strain.

The work was carried out in collaboration with Anna-Liisa Laine and her research group at University of Helsinki, who have been studying the interaction between the host plant ribwort plantain, Plantago lanceolata, and its powdery mildew pathogen across hundreds of populations.

A new exciting arts and science project teaming up mixed media artists with researchers in infectious diseases starts at the Centre for Immunity, Infection and Evolution, in Ashworth Laboratories, University of Edinburgh in January. This project has been organised in collaboration with ASCUS Art & Science.

For the micro-residency our artists will spend fourteen days of contact time mingling with the Ashworthians; they will be attending seminars and symposia, visiting labs, discussing the science and socialising during coffee breaks and happy hours. The micro-residencies will end in March culminating in an exhibition at the Edinburgh International Science Festival 2015 (EISF).

Prompted by the recent Ebola press conference held by UN, World Bank and WHO, Mark Woolhouse, Patrick Drury and Christopher Dye comment on the ways of modern outbreak management in their editorial published in Science last week.

They note that in addition to strengthening the response to outbreaks it’s important to work on global surveillance and detection at the very early stages of the epidemics when it is easier to contain.

Parasites use Trojan horse subterfuge to suppress the immunity of their victims when causing infection, according to a study.

The finding, which shows a new trick parasites can play, paves the way to possible treatments for infectious diseases and allergies.

CIIE funds are being used to upgrade the Busia laboratory facility on the Kenya-Uganda border.

In early 2015 the lab will be engaged in a new project to set up an integrated surveillance system that covers both the human and livestock populations in the region.

We are pleased to announce the new ASCUS micro-residency programme at the Centre for Immunity, Infection and Evolution.

Scientists have made progress in understanding how pathogens cause disease, escape our immune defences and spread in populations. However pathogen evolution threatens this progress, generating drug resistance, rendering vaccines ineffective and allowing invasion of new hosts and populations.