News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Alabama health officials are investigating a cluster of severe respiratory infections from an unknown origin centered around the Dothan area and have asked the state's health providers to be alert for and report similar cases.

(CIDRAP News) – Many Northern Hemisphere countries, from North America to temperate Asia, have seen rising flu activity in recent weeks, while cases ebbed or remained scarce in most of the rest of the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

(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.