News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Flu activity in the Northern Hemisphere continued to climb last week, led by a vigorous pace of infections in the United States and Canada in the lead-up to the Christmas holiday season, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

(CIDRAP News) – Experiments on the novel coronavirus that has infected patients from three Middle Eastern countries show that the receptor it uses to infect human cells is different from the one used by its relative the SARS virus and that it can infect cells from a range of animals, according to a study released today.

(CIDRAP News) – The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) today announced an update of its risk assessment on novel coronavirus, which takes into account the possibility of human-to-human spread, the wider geographic area where infections occurred, and risks the virus may pose to healthcare workers.

(CIDRAP News) – Diagnostic tests for the novel coronavirus (CoV) that recently emerged in the Middle East are being deployed rapidly in Europe, and about 250 patients have already been tested for the virus, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

(CIDRAP News) – The reporting of four more novel coronavirus infections in recent weeks, raising the total to six, has prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to suggest that governments consider a major escalation of testing for the virus, a potentially burdensome undertaking.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday approved the nation's first cell-based flu vaccine, a product from Novartis that uses technology that could help vaccinate more Americans in a pandemic but still has many of the same limitations of older egg-based flu vaccines.