News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) Ð Low levels ofchloramphenicol, a potentially harmful antibiotic that cannot legally be addedto food, have been found in honey imported from China, federal officialsannounced yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – A Saskatchewan man who died earlier this summer was Canada's first victim of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), but he probably acquired the disease in the United Kingdom, Canadian health officials announced yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced it will increase testing of imported shrimp and crayfish to look for traces of the antibiotic chloramphenicol, which some countries have found in imports from China and Vietnam.

(CIDRAP News) – Although clear evidence links a recent widespread outbreak of Salmonella infection in the United States and Canada with eating cantaloupe, just how the cantaloupe became contaminated remains unclear, according to federal and state health officials.

(CIDRAP News) – It is 13 days since the emergence of a hypothetical smallpox epidemic caused by the release of virus in three US shopping malls. Some 16,000 cases have been reported, 1,000 people have died, and the nation is running out of vaccine. Hospitals are overflowing, and federal and state officials are at odds over how to contain the epidemic.