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Blood test could gauge if a baby has a dangerous infection in 15 minutes
Blood tests can reveal a lot about a baby’s health
isayildiz/Getty Images
A blood test could determine whether a feverish baby has a bacterial or viral infection in 15 to 20 minutes. This would help doctors gauge whether the infection is serious or may pass without treatment, which could prevent unnecessary use of antibiotics.
When babies are brought into hospital with fever, they “are considered high-risk until proven otherwise”, says Tommaso Bellini at the Giannina Gaslini Institute in Genoa, Italy.
A fever can be the result of several things, including infection by viruses or bacteria. These different types of pathogens require different medications. Furthermore, most common viruses are fairly benign, while bacterial infections are generally more dangerous, says Bellini.
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Existing tests to gauge infection type take at least a few hours, so babies with fever are often given antibiotics against bacteria as a precautionary measure. But only about 15 per cent of them actually have a serious bacterial infection, says Bellini. This unnecessary use of antibiotics helps drive the spread of bacterial resistance.
To develop a test that determines infection type, Bellini and his colleagues followed 85 babies, all younger than 90 days old, who were brought into emergency rooms with fever after previously having no serious health concerns. The team took blood samples and tested for two proteins: CD64 and CD169.
Previous studies have shown that these proteins become more common in certain blood cells when the body responds to infections. CD64 is made at higher levels in response to bacteria and is found on the surface of white blood cells called neutrophils. CD169 rises in response to viruses and appears on the outer membranes of monocytes, another type of white blood cell.
By comparing the levels of both proteins in neutrophils and monocytes, the test correctly identified all 15 cases of bacterial infection, 44 incidences of viral infection and 26 cases of no infection. Bellini presented the results at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Paris, France.
The results came through in 15 to 20 minutes in a lab, says Bellini, who is trying to develop a version that can be used as quickly in hospitals.
This builds on several years of research to develop a CD64/CD169 test. Fabrice Malergue at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences in Marseille, France, has spent much of the past decade working on it. In 2021, his team found that CD64 and CD169 levels reliably distinguish between bacterial and viral infections among adults in an emergency room.
Other groups have since replicated that finding, found ways to perform the test more quickly and easily, and demonstrated that it works in children. Performing the test on babies in a hospital setting is a significant advance, says Malergue. It was crucial to investigate the test in this age group because their immune systems are still developing, which meant “some people had doubts about the capacity of these [CD64 and CD169] markers to arise”, he says.
Malergue says one of his collaborators used the test in Martinique during an outbreak of dengue fever, which is caused by a virus and is usually mild. The collaborator found that some people actually had a bacterial infection called leptospirosis, which is life-threatening without antibiotics.
Bellini now hopes to assess the test in a trial of 300 to 500 infants at multiple hospitals. Meanwhile, Malergue and his colleagues have developed a benchtop machine that can quickly analyse finger-prick blood samples to determine whether an infection is viral or bacterial, which is approved for research use.
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Virtual green spaces and classical music reduce blood pressure in hospital
Virtual reality could be a simple way of bringing a patient’s blood pressure down
Ground Picture/Shutterstock
Gazing at a flowing river while listening to classical music could lower the blood pressure of people in the emergency room. Luckily, as these landscapes and live orchestras are hard to come by in hospitals, virtual reality and playlists do the job.
Dangerously high blood pressure, known as hypertensive urgency, is common among people in intensive-care settings. Medication can prevent it from causing damage to the eyes, heart and brain. However, relaxation approaches, such as looking at aquarium scenes and listening to classical music, have also shown promise.
Now, Safa Dönmez at the University of Health Sciences in Ankara, Turkey, and his colleagues have combined these two approaches to relaxation. The team recruited 130 adults who arrived in an emergency department with hypertensive urgency. These patients are often anxious, which can make their bodies release stress hormones that tighten blood vessels and further hike up blood pressure, says Dönmez.
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The researchers gave all the participants standard medication to reduce blood pressure. Half also viewed a scene of the Columbia River in Canada flowing through a forest via a VR headset while listening to a soothing playlist of classical music from the likes of Debussy, Bach and Mozart. “Overall, the aim was to create a calm, natural and relaxing environment,” says Dönmez.
Before treatment, the participants’ arterial pressure was about 130 to 138 mmHg, on average. Fifteen minutes after the intervention, it had dropped by about 12mmHG among those who only took medication, compared with about 16 mmHg for those also having the VR and music experience. The results were presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress in Paris, France.
Verónica Saldaña-Ortiz at the European University in Madrid, Spain, says that seeing such results so quickly is clinically significant. “In an emergency department, even a relatively simple non-pharmacological intervention that helps patients feel calmer during the initial phase of care could be clinically valuable,” she says.
After 30 minutes, the difference had shrunk, and by 60 minutes, the blood pressure readings of the two groups were about the same.
The intervention’s initial positive effect on blood pressure may be related to its impact on anxiety, says Dönmez. Anxiety fell by a greater amount in the VR/music group, according to ratings using a questionnaire called the State Anxiety Inventory.
“The results are consistent with a growing body of work that shows that even virtual nature can help reduce stress, including reductions in blood pressure, in stressful situations,” says Mathew White at the University of Exeter, UK. “Extending this approach to an emergency room setting seems like a wonderful idea, and hopefully results can be replicated and more widely implemented if confirmed.”
The VR and classical music were delivered together, so we cannot determine whether the benefit came from the music, the virtual environment or both, says Saldaña-Ortiz. Dönmez says the team is planning to do larger studies with longer follow-up periods to disentangle this and see whether patients choosing their own music makes a difference.
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Anthropic’s discovery will, at best, be just another gene-editing tool
The AI company Anthropic has announced that its Claude large language model has discovered a system reminiscent of CRISPR, but that doesn’t mean the Nobel prizes will start rolling in, says Michael Le Page
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Backpack massages muscles when it detects they’re fatigued
People wore the backpack while lifting dumbbells and then enjoyed a nice massage
Huang et al., 2026, Cell Reports Physical Science
A backpack can detect when muscles become fatigued and automatically massage the affected areas. This seems to help muscles recover better than heat therapy or pre-programmed massages, like those delivered by chairs and cushions.
About 1 in 6 adults in the UK have some form of back pain. This can occur when back muscles become fatigued through exertion or prolonged or repetitive activity. Persistent fatigue can impair local blood flow and tissue recovery, potentially contributing to chronic pain.
Tired back muscles can be relieved through heat therapy and automated massage, which often involves rollers moving across the back in pre-programmed patterns. But these tend to be standardised treatments that don’t take into account people’s individual muscular issues, says Chengsong Yu at the Wuhan Institute of Technology in China.
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Looking for a more bespoke approach, Yu and his colleagues have developed a wearable system, like a backpack, that uses electrodes on the skin to monitor electrical activity in four groups of back muscles. The system then determines which muscles are fatigued, and how much. Cables move a soft massage head to the affected areas, where sensor feedback allows the system to continually adjust the force according to the fatigue levels, says Yu.
To test their device, the researchers asked 11 men and four women, aged 20 to 26, with no known health issues, to spend 2 minutes resting, followed by 2 minutes repeatedly lifting dumbbells while seated. This induces fatigue in the rhomboids, the muscles between the shoulder blades.
All the participants wore the backpack during the dumbbell exercise so it could record their muscles’ electrical activity, but only some then received the backpack’s massage. The remaining participants divided into groups that received another type of pre-programmed massage, had heat therapy or rested.
During the exercise, the electrical activity in the participants’ rhomboids fell as the muscles became fatigued, indicating weaker muscle activation. But after the backpack treatment, this activity was about 2.6 times higher compared with after the pre-programmed massage, indicating greater recovery. It was also about 1.9 times higher than after heat treatment, and four times higher than after resting.
“We were encouraged by how clearly the adaptive system improved muscle recovery compared with preprogrammed mechanostimulation and thermal stimulation,” says Yu.
Conor Walsh at Harvard University says the device is a move in a “creative direction” for combining soft robotics with mechanical therapy to address back pain and muscle fatigue. But it needs to be lighter and less bulky before it can become a practical solution, he says.
“There are definitely some very interesting engineering features in the system, and I see a lot of value in this as a proof of concept for this technology,” says Olivier Lambercy at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “But if you want to use it in the context of people working on the assembly line as they claim, I think this is a bit far into the future.”
The team hopes to make the design smaller and more compact, and to test it in a larger group of people working in real-world conditions that may cause back pain, says Yu.
Journal Reference:
Cell Reports Physical Science
DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103505
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Taking HRT in perimenopause may ward off cardiovascular disease
Hormone replacement therapies may reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke, but the timing of when they are started could be critical
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Skin patch that collects sweat could predict ovulation
A patch that measures levels of two reproductive hormones in sweat has shown promise for predicting ovulation in a small study
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Lifestyle changes may be as effective as therapy at easing depression
Advice about mindful eating, enjoying exercise and getting good-quality sleep was at least as effective for treating depression as cognitive behavioural therapy
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Severe meningitis outbreak caused by bacteria that took genes from microbiome
A student being vaccinated against meningitis at the University of Kent on 18 March 2026
Victoria Jones/Shutterstock
A severe outbreak of invasive meningococcal disease, which can cause meningitis and sepsis, in Kent earlier this year was driven by a strain of bacteria that took genes from harmless microbes. This helped the bacteria evade the immune system and obtain iron from blood, boosting their growth.
“What was really unusual about the outbreak is quite how explosive it was,” says Emma Wall at Queen Mary University of London, who wasn’t involved in the discovery. “[The bacterium] clearly gained a set of genetic changes that made it better at hiding from the immune system and better at harvesting nutrients. That made it a really super powerful bug.”
In March, 21 people – mostly university or high school students – are known to have become infected with a strain of the bacteria Neisseria meningitidis group B at a nightclub in Canterbury, Kent in the UK. N. meningitidis usually spreads via close and prolonged contact with saliva from an infected person via things like kissing and sharing drinks or vapes.
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N. meningitidis lives harmlessly in the nose and throat of between 5 and 10 per cent of people without health problems, but genetic changes can cause it to become more invasive and enter the bloodstream, leading to invasive meningococcal disease (IMD). This can cause sepsis, a life-threatening immune reaction to the bacteria, or meningitis, where bacteria infect the thin lining surrounding the brain and spinal cord, causing inflammation.
All the IMD cases in Kent occurred within about a week. They were treated in hospital, with nine requiring intensive care. “The incredibly rapid nature of the outbreak was unprecedented [for the UK],” says Wall. “Usually these [outbreaks] roll over two or three weeks and there’s one or two cases that end up in hospital.”
To understand this, Martin Maiden at the University of Oxford and his colleagues sequenced the entire genome of live N. meningitidis in blood samples taken from six of the cases, including the two people who died.
The bacterial genomes from the six cases were almost identical, suggesting the outbreak started from one person. Next, the team compared one of these genomes with 48,000 others from Neisseria strains collected during prior outbreaks or from people without known health problems.
This revealed that the Kent strain had acquired several genes from a harmless strain of Neisseria meningitidis and another bacterium that lives harmlessly in up to 28 per cent of adults, called Neisseria cinerea. Bacteria constantly carry out such genetic exchanges via a process called horizontal transfer, which can involve them forming tiny tunnels between each other, through which they transfer copies of genes.
Some of the genes acquired by the Kent strain enhanced its uptake of iron from blood, which it needs to survive and replicate. Others reduced the amount of sugar that was coating a tail-like structure, called the pilus, on the bacteria. This enabled them to clump together and evade destruction by immune cells, such as neutrophils. “Neutrophils will try and come and eat an individual bacteria, but they can’t eat a clump; it’s too big,” says Wall.
“There was this catalogue of changes that made this organism really transmissible, but also really invasive,” says Maiden. This meant that several people became very ill and were then less able to transmit the infection to the public. “If you’re ill, you’re not going to be going around transmitting organisms, so the outbreak ended very quickly,” says Maiden.
It’s unclear when exactly these genetic changes occurred in the person who is thought to have initiated the outbreak, but they probably happened gradually, until there was the right combination of genetics and social mixing, says Maiden.
Such insights could support the development of better vaccines against N. meningitidis if we can target the features that make the bacteria particularly invasive, says Wall. But they won’t help us predict the next highly invasive strain. “[These bacteria are] inherently highly unpredictable,” says Maiden.
Following the Kent outbreak, the UK government launched a menB vaccination programme for young people starting university or further education in September or October this year. Symptoms of IMD include fever, headache, a stiff neck, joint and muscle pain, and a rash that doesn’t fade when pressed with glass.
Reference:
bioRxiv
DOI: 10.64898/2026.09.17.752363
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Should we use GLP-1 drugs to treat obesity in children?
Children as young as 8 in the US are being prescribed off-label GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, sparking debate about the potential long-term health effects
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Short bursts of exercise can boost your cognition
Just a couple of minutes of walking around or stretching every hour can improve memory and attention span
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