As future covid-19 prevalence varies across time, health authorities must revolutionise testing to see if people are infected.

Viruses do not evolve with the purpose of being more or less infectious or dangerous: it is just natural selection at work. New random variants occur continuously and most of them are neutral or make the virus less infectious.

Around 700,000 people are killed by antibiotic resistant infections in the world every year, estimates say. Antimicrobials are increasingly overused and misused, while some organisms are becoming more resistant to antibiotics.

When it comes to the emergence of antimalarial drug resistance, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Leishmaniasis is a tropical disease known in Europe because it affects dogs. It is caused by the Leishmania parasite carried by sandflies . However, several types of the parasite also affect humans in several regions in the world.

About 20 million Europeans are subject to food allergies. Now scientists are looking at these allergies in new ways. It involves the food industry in its work and pays special attention to the link between early diets and allergy in later life .

Whooping cough and bronchiolitis are respiratory infections frequently affecting young children. In particular, infants under three months are very sensitive to these illnesses, which can lead to death in the most severe cases .

In Europe, whooping cough ( Pertussis ) is in the increase, with more than 20.000 cases reported annually . Often infants fall victim to the disease, where it can be life-threatening.

European researchers have designed two new vaccine candidates to fight the HIV virus. These have been developed within the EU-funded project EURONEUT 41 .

HIV is still plaguing humanity with 35 million infected people worldwide. Antiretroviral drugs do slow down the progression of the disease but at a high cost and with long term toxicity.

Many people in Europe are critical of genetically modified (GM) food, due to safety concerns. A Eurobarometer survey, published in 2010, revealed that the European public tends to be worried on a “mediate level” about GM food , with people in Austria being particularly concerned.

This is a breakthrough in the struggle against the increasingly resistant malaria parasite and the search for improved drugs and effective vaccines.

It is a damning neologism of our age, a new word combining the threat of two major health problems of epidemic-like proportions. In Europe alone, around 33 million adults are expected to be suffering from type-2 diabetes by 2010.