News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Increased surveillance in recent years has begun to fill in some of the huge information gaps regarding influenza in Africa, which should eventually make it possible to develop or improve public health interventions, according to a big collection of articles published recently in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID).

(CIDRAP News) – Commercially available rapid influenza diagnostic tests (RIDTs) detected common virus strains at high concentrations fairly well but performed variably at lower concentrations, an evaluation of all 11 Food and Drug Administration–approved RIDTs showed.

The world needs much better influenza vaccines, but the quest for them faces a formidable barrier: overconfidence about the effectiveness of existing influenza vaccines.