In 2016, the number of whooping cough cases has reached a worrying record in Germany – 22,000 lab confirmed cases were reported to the Robert-Koch-Institute (RKI). In the previous year there were 14,000 cases and more than 1,500 patients have already been registered in 2017 (as of February 9th, 2017). Whooping cough is caused by […]
The ongoing Zika virus epidemic has been and is still today an important topic in the Americas. There is, however, another serious health issue for pregnant women and their unborn babies which is far less frequently addressed: syphilis. According to current data, there were 33,000 infected pregnant women in Brazil in 2015, twenty times as
In the current issue of the medical journal Trillium Diagnostik (14(3): 172-173), Prof Dr Rudolf Gruber and Dr Gabriele Egert, experts for laboratory diagnostics, clearly explain the advantages of defined recombinant allergen components which are applied in modern molecular allergy diagnostics. While allergens which are extracted and purified from natural allergen sources always constitute a
Prof. Rolf Hilgenfeld and his team from the Institute for Biochemistry at the University of Lübeck look back at several months of intense work, including many night shifts. At the end of July 2016, their work on the crystal structure of a protein essential for survival of the Zika virus was published in the scientific
Scientist of the European Vasculitis Study (EUVAS) group published the results of a recent study (Csernok et al., Autoimmunity Reviews 2016) testing the performance of two fully automated platforms for multiparametric ANCA IIFT diagnostics which combine cell substrates and monospecific antigen substrates: the EUROPLUS Granulocyte Mosaic (EUROPattern, Euroimmun AG) and CytoBead ANCA (Aklides, Medipan/Generic Assays
