A Queen's University infectious disease expert has collaborated in the development of a disinfection system that may change the way hospital rooms all over the world are cleaned as well as stop bed bug outbreaks in hotels and apartments.

"This is the future, because many hospital deaths are preventable with better cleaning methods," says Dick Zoutman, who is also Quinte Health Care's new Chief of Staff.

University of Virginia Health System researchers are the first in the world to develop a new and faster method to track major infection-causing "superbugs" a major key in preventing the spread of deadly infections.

Their research, published in the November/December 2011 issue of the online journal mBio, comes at a critical time.

Several newly discovered genes such as KPC (Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase) and NDM (New Delhi metallo-betalactamase) have experts on alert for several reasons:

-- their ability to easily transform bacteria into antibiotic-resistant superbugs

-- their unprecedented ability to cross over into different strains and species of bacteria

Infections picked up in hospital affect almost a third of patients in intensive care, and kill 44% of those people. Given that some infectious agents can linger for weeks or months it is increasingly important that staff awareness of the problem is improved and that training in infection prevention across the National Health Service and in private healthcare is expanded, according to researchers at the University of Northampton.

Breast cancer cells that mutate to resist drug treatment survive by establishing tiny pumps on their surface that reject the drugs as they penetrate the cell membrane - making the cancer insensitive to chemotherapy drugs even after repeated use.

Researchers have found a new way to break that resistance and shut off the pumps by genetically altering those breast cancer cells to forcibly activate a heat-shock protein called Hsp27. This protein regulates several others, including the protein that sets up the pumps that turn away the chemotherapeutics.

In experiments, the common chemotherapy drug Doxorubicin killed about 50 percent more drug-resistant breast cancer cells in which Hsp27 had been activated than it did in normal drug-resistant cells.

A new paper by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers that included Shahriar Mobashery, Jeffrey Peng, Brian Baker and their researchers Oleg Borbulevych, Malika Kumararasiri, Brian Wilson, Leticia Llarrull, Mijoon Lee, Dusan Hesek and Qicun Shi describes a unique process that is central to induction of antibiotic resistance in the problematic bacterium methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

MRSA first emerged in the United Kingdom in 1961and spread rapidly across the globe. Modern strains of MRSA are broadly resistant to antibiotics of various classes, but resistance to B-lactam antibiotics, which include penicillins, cephalosporins, and carpapenems, is an acute problem because it impacts virtually all commercially available members of the class.