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No approved human vaccine exists against San Joaquin Valley fever or, for that matter, against any other fungal disease (7).

Retrospective evidence from patient studies suggests that people who contract an acute pulmonary or disseminated Coccidioides infection and recover develop lifelong cell-mediated immunity against recurrent coccidioidomycosis.

Based on this observation, together with results of protection studies with experimental animals, it has been proposed that generation of a vaccine against this respiratory mycosis is feasible.

Unfortunately, when laboratory methods rely solely on cultivation of pathogens and traditional phenotypic methods of pathogen characterization, physicians are forced to deduce the presence of BSI based on clinical symptoms, which are often nonspecific. Subsequently, antibiotic therapy is initiated based on clinical and epidemiologic profiles (28) rather than on laboratory evidence. Typically, within 1 to 3 days a microscopic Gram stain category (Gram-positive bacteria, Gram-negative bacteria, or fungi) provides physicians with a general direction for antibiotic therapy. Definitive results that eliminate the need for broad-spectrum therapy and enable de-escalation and the tailoring of treatment to the most effective antibiotic regimen often require more than 3 to 5 days. This gap has been implicated as one reason for high mortality and the emergence of drug-resistant microbes.

The disease "could wipe out half of the bat species in the US," she says. "It's caused one of the fastest declines of wildlife that we've seen in the US."

Seagrass meadows, among the most endangered ecosystems on Earth, play an outsize role in the health of the oceans.

The plants also fight disease, it turns out. A team of scientists reported on Thursday that seagrasses can purge pathogens from the ocean that threaten humans and coral reefs alike.

But the meadows are vanishing at a rate of a football field every 30 minutes.

The drug was contaminated with the spores of a common leaf mold — nobody knows how.

Five patients have died.

Compounding pharmacies, which provide up to 10 percent of U.S. pharmaceuticals, are more loosely regulated than traditional drug companies. As is common, NECC is licensed by a state pharmacy board, which doesn't have the staff to conduct regular inspections. The company has been cited for contamination problems in the past, as the Boston Globe reports.

14,000 Americans

alert to illness among patients who have received injections of hundreds of other products

the number must run into the tens of thousands.