News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today confirmed two more novel flu infections, one an H3N2 variant that has been identified in 11 other patients this year and one an H1N1 variant that has never been reported in humans before.

(CIDRAP News) – Novartis's new cell-culture based influenza vaccine factory in North Carolina has begun making a prepandemic H5N1 flu vaccine and is ready to start producing vaccines for a real pandemic when needed, the company and federal health officials announced yesterday.

The facility in Holly Springs, N.C., billed as the first of its kind in the United States, was dedicated yesterday after a long testing process.

(CIDRAP News) – Though botulism outbreaks in Europe are often traced to home-canned food, three recent outbreaks were linked to commercially distributed food, raising important food safety issues, investigators reported last week.

(CIDRAP News) – New surveillance data in Europe show a steep rise in the percentage of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumonia, a drug-resistant issue seen as a growing threat in the United States as well.

(CIDRAP News) – Producers of sprouts should add more food safety steps throughout the production chain to lower the risk of the kind of contamination that triggered a widespread Escherichia coli outbreak in Europe earlier this year, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said in a report released yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – Against a backdrop of state, national, and international efforts to raise awareness about appropriate antibiotic use, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a new tracking system to monitor use of the drugs in hospitals.