News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The world registered fewer human infections with H5N1 avian influenza in 2012, but the fatality rate was a little higher than in previous years, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted in a recent review of the year's data.

(CIDRAP News) – The number of reported H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks in poultry and wild birds has decreased since mid 2011 and was down sharply in the second quarter of this year, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a quarterly update on the ongoing situation.

(CIDRAP News) – An annual report released yesterday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) profiles a wide range of CDC influenza-related projects around the world, from flu surveillance in Indonesia to vaccine effectiveness studies in El Salvador and epidemiology training in Ghana.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today recommended changing two of the three strains in next season's influenza vaccine for the Northern Hemisphere, ending a couple of years of stability in the vaccine's makeup.

The WHO's flu experts called for changing the A/H3N2 and B components of the vaccine but continuing to use a strain of the pandemic 2009 virus for the A/H1N1 component.

(CIDRAP News) – A run of stability in the makeup of seasonal influenza vaccines continued as the World Health Organization (WHO) recently recommended using the same three flu strains in next year's Southern Hemisphere vaccine as are in the current Northern Hemisphere vaccine and were used last year in southern countries.

(CIDRAP News) – An analysis of global human H5N1 avian influenza cases over the past 5 years shows that the overall case-fatality rate (CFR) declined somewhat and that older children and adults were far more likely to die than were children under age 10, says a new report by German scientists.