disease

Topic description and stories

Conceptual image showing blurred brain with loss of neuronal networks

Scientists reveal plan to target the cause of Alzheimer’s disease

24 Sep 2018

Researchers have developed a new way to target the toxic particles that destroy healthy brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease.

Geographic patterns of spread of influenza pandemic

Citizen science experiment predicts massive toll of flu pandemic on the UK

22 Mar 2018

How fast could a new flu epidemic spread? The results of the UK’s largest citizen science project of its kind ever attempted, carried out by...

Detail from plate 5 of Hogarth’s “A Harlot’s Progress”, with the protagonist, Moll, dying of syphilis.

Pox populi: Study calculates 18th century syphilis rates for first time

14 Sep 2017

The unlikely coincidence of a local hospital record and a census led by a pioneering physician has enabled the first study charting rates of venereal...

Image of “amyloid fibrils”; thread-like structures which form after the protein alpha-synuclein aggregates. Plaques (protein deposits) consisting of this protein have been found in the brains of Parkinson ’s Disease patients and linked to disease.

Tiny changes in Parkinson’s protein can have “dramatic” impact on processes that lead to the disease

30 Aug 2016

Specific mutations in the protein associated with Parkinson’s Disease, in which just one of its 140 building blocks is altered, can make a dramatic...

Large-scale tree mortality in northern Sonoma County, California, Credit: David Rizzo

California’s sudden oak death epidemic now ‘unstoppable’ and new epidemics must be managed earlier

02 May 2016

New research shows the sudden oak death epidemic in California cannot now be stopped, but that its tremendous ecological and economic impacts could...

Actin cables in Drosophila nurse cells during late-oogenesis. At this stage, nurse cells die and extrude their cytoplasm into the developing oocyte.

Opinion: How fruit flies can help keep African scientists at home

15 Feb 2016

Timothy Weil (Department of Zoology) and Silvia Muñoz-Descalzo (University of Bath) discuss the project that aims to make the fruit fly a model...

A human embryo at the blastocyst stage, about six days after fertilization, viewed under a light microscope.

Opinion: How close are we to successfully editing genes in human embryos?

17 Dec 2015

Azim Surani (Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute) discusses gene editing of the human germline.

Policemen in Seattle wearing masks made by the Red Cross, during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, December 1918.

On the trail of history’s biggest killers

06 Mar 2015

As well as telling us more about earlier societies, the study of diseases in the past is proving an invaluable tool for modern science, as a new book...