News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Three provinces in eastern China that have already reported several H7N9 avian flu infections each announced a new case today, bringing the country's total to 64 cases, according to official and media sources.

(CIDRAP News) – In the history of infectious diseases, coincidence plays an extraordinary role. In 1706, Cotton Mather purchased a slave named Onesimus who happened to come from a tribe that practiced variolation, and so smallpox prevention was introduced to North America.

(CIDRAP News) – A virus recovered from victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic kills by replicating so rapidly that it revs the immune system into overdrive, turning the body against itself, a team of scientists report in today's issue of the journal Nature.

(CIDRAP News) – An international group of experts that will advise the World Health Organization (WHO) on avian and pandemic influenza issues met for the first time yesterday in Geneva, Switzerland.

(CIDRAP News) – Canadian officials said yesterday they would destroy all the poultry on a British Columbia farm where a duck was found to be carrying a low-pathogenic H5 avian influenza virus.

That announcement came 2 days after the Canadian government reported the identification of a low-pathogenic strain of H5N1 virus in wild birds in Manitoba and other flu viruses in wild birds in British Columbia and Quebec.