Diarrheal Diseases

Graduate student Amanda Ojeda won best research poster in the EPI Research Day 2023 trainee research poster competition. Her research focused on identifying the prevalence and the composition of Campylobacter species in infants in a rural area of eastern Ethiopia during their first year of life and potential reservoirs. The project was a team collaboration between Ojeda and collaborators at the University of Florida, Haramaya University, Ohio State University, Washington University in St. Louis and Massey University in New Zealand. 

UF students and researchers address the links between intestinal pathogens, livestock, and children’s gut health.

Emerging Pathogens Institute researchers trace the origin of dangerous new strains of Shigella bacteria that present novel threats to public health.

EPI researcher Anthony Maurelli co-authored a chapter entitled “A Brief History of Shigella” as part of the electronic encyclopedia EcoSal Plus, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.

For more than four decades, cholera has recurred in Cameroon, affecting tens of thousands of people a year. Most recently, the West African country was one of four that had a death rate of more than five percent from the bacterial disease, exceeding the World Health Organization’s target of less than one percent. Now, researchers have discovered one reason Cameroon has struggled to control the disease. Cholera follows different, distinct outbreak patterns in different climate subzones of the large country, the researchers reported in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

A UF/IFAS researcher and his colleagues are far more certain now that a new biological treatment could prevent dairy cattle from getting uterine diseases, which might improve food safety for people. Their findings, in which they used chitosan microparticles to cure bacteria in the uteri, are published in a new study.

A new biological treatment could help dairy cattle stave off uterine diseases and eventually may help improve food safety for humans, a University of Florida study shows.