News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration said today it is starting a criminal investigation of Peanut Corp. of America (PCA), the company whose peanut processing plant in Georgia has been linked with a Salmonella outbreak involving more than 500 cases nationwide.

The FDA announcement came amid a flurry of other developments related to the outbreak:

(CIDRAP News) – Health officials in the Philippines recently announced that a worker who had contact with sick pigs tested positive for antibodies to the Ebola Reston virus, a pathogen that was discovered about a month ago for the first time in pigs.

Eric Tayag, head of the National Epidemiology Centre, said the case represent the first known pig-to-human Ebola Reston virus transmission, according to a Jan 24 Associated Press (AP) report.

(CIDRAP News) – Health ministries in China and Egypt reported four new human H5N1 avian influenza cases over the past few days, including three from different parts of China, two of which were fatal.

Today's World Health Organization (WHO) confirmation of a case in a 2-year-old Egyptian girl pushed the global H5N1 case count to 400. If the WHO confirms all of the new cases and deaths, the total will rise to 403 cases, 254 of them fatal.

(CIDRAP News) – A physician's report of diarrhea cases in a nursing home, followed by the discovery of cases in several other institutions, provided the key that enabled Minnesota disease detectives to figure out before anyone else that peanut butter was the culprit in the current nationwide Salmonella outbreak.