The cost study looked at different attack-rate ranges, putting the upper-end estimate at as much as $2 billion.
As more and more Americans consume unpasteurized, or "raw," milk and cheese, a new study in Emerging Infectious Disease found that the unpasteurized products cause 840 times more illnesses and 45 times more hospitalizations than their pasteurized counterparts.
Puerto Rico may be underreporting or downplaying the numbers of babies born in the territory with Zika-related birth defects, Stat reported today, citing an unnamed former US health official.
Brazil, reporting thousands of new chikungunya cases, almost single-handedly produced another big jump in cases in the Americas for the second straight week, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reported late last week.
PAHO reported 9,522 new confirmed and suspected cases in its Apr 14 update, after logging 7,231 new cases the week before. The case count for 2017 has now reached 29,841, PAHO said.
Zika virus has been silently circulating in West Africa for more than two decades, according to a study of 387 blood samples collected from 1992 to 2016, researchers from Harvard University, Nigeria, and Senegal reported in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
The virus was first identified in 1947 but wasn't linked with known epidemics until 2007 and hadn't been linked to neurologic disease before 2015.
Saudi Arabia reported two new MERS-CoV cases over the weekend, including a case in an asymptomatic healthcare worker who contracted the virus in a healthcare setting.
More details emerged today on President Donald Trump's proposed budget, including plans to drastically cut research grant funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the current fiscal year, which ends in October.
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health (MOH) reported two new cases of MERS and three deaths in previously reported patients in recent days. Both of the new cases were linked to camel contact.
Over the past few days Saudi Arabia reported seven new MERS-CoV infections, including six that appear to be linked to a hospital outbreak in Wadi ad-Dawasir in the south central part of the country.
Egypt today reported two human H5N1 avian flu cases, one of them fatal, according to notifications from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Few details were reported. One of the cases occurred in Minya governorate and was observed on Feb 1. The fatal case was reported from Faiyum governorate and was observed on Feb 5. Both governorates are in upper Egypt.