clair088

They may be called parasites, but we may owe helminth worms a great deal of appreciation.  At least, that’s what Dr Maizels and McSorley write in this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(3): 666-675 ).  To those who are unaware, there are only about a dozen or so species of helminths that commonly infect human beings, but they affect more than 2 billion people worldwide.  Their wide prevalence is a testament to the fact that they can evade host defenses and establish niches from themselves within our bodies.  Learning about how they do this can provide valuable insights about how our immune system works. They do this through many different ways.  T-cells from helminth-infected asymptomatic humans show an increase in IL-4, IL-10, and TGF-beta over IL-17 and Interferon-gamma, suggesting that parasites skew our T-cells in a way that reduces the immune system’s ability to clear helminths.  In partic...

Childhood asthma affects over 6 million children in the United States.  In addition to its effects on physical health, asthma has an impact on academic and personal development.  Asthma related absences lead to decreased reading proficiency and increased learning disabilities.  In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Lemanske and colleagues describe the creation of a central resource, termed SAMPRO (School-based Asthma Management Program). ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(3): 711-723 ). The SAMPRO workforce identified four components for development and implementation: (1) a circle of support facilitating communication, (2) asthma management plans, (3) comprehensive education plan, and (4) assessment of school environment.  The circle of support is comprised of persons involved in taking care of children, including family, school personnel, clinicians, and community members.  School nurses in particular are pivotal in helping t...

The issue of “Data Sharing” has received considerable coverage in the medical literature and in the lay press recently.  There is a push to increase data transparency and to open such data for secondary use and analysis.  There have been different approaches to this issue with varying degrees of access. .  In this month’s issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Asare and colleagues describe their experiences with TrialShare, an online research resource providing data from the Immune Tolerance Network (ITN) of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) ( J Allergy Clin Immunol 2016; 138(3): 724-726 ). Users of TrialShare have access to clinical trial protocols, case report forms, complete trial results, extensive de-identified participant level data, downloadable datasets for offline use, the ability to create alternate analyses, and a searchable database of ITN bio-specimen repository, among other features.  The only requireme...