CIDRAP newsletters options
Liberia and Sierra Leone have taken new actions to curb infections, as response activities and testing of possible travel-related cases play out on other continents.
This year's tally of US chikungunya cases related to foreign travel, mostly to the Caribbean, has risen to 484, an increase of 86 over the past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.
Forty states have reported cases, three more than a week ago, the agency said in an Aug 5 update. The number of locally acquired cases stayed at four, all of them in Florida.
Treatment of two US citizens with an Ebola drug raises ethical questions over who should get scarce, unlicensed drugs.
With the situation in Nigeria worsening, CDC takes an action it last took during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.
Long-term treatment with a newer artemisinin-based combination drug for malaria, dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP), substantially and safely reduces the risk of malaria in young children, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published online yesterday in PLoS Medicine.
Two leading experts urge both sides in the debate to keep an open mind and to set up a conference.
CDC experts cover a range of issues, such as proper protective equipment.
The second American infected with Ebola returned home today, as new information emerged about experimental treatment use and more possible cases.
An enhanced system of surveillance for MERS-CoV in England turned up 2 cases of the disease among 77 potential candidates meeting case definitions in its first year of operation, according to a dispatch yesteday in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The numbers are small, say the authors, but in the context of emerging pathogens, reporting data like theirs can help optimize case detection and surveillance systems.
An H5N1 avian flu virus that killed a Canadian woman in January had two uncommon mutations that may have helped increase its ability to bind to human cells, researchers from Singapore and Canada reported yesterday in a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
About two thirds of the 38,000 new cases reported last week were in the Dominican Republic.
A US doctor with Ebola is improving and new cases have been reported in Morocco and Nigeria, as the outbreak reaches 1,603 cases and 887 deaths.
A World Health Organization (WHO) emergency committee has extended a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) over the global polio situation and the temporary recommendations that came with it, the WHO said in a statement yesterday. The group met by teleconference on Jul 31, its first meeting since it first declared the PHEIC on May 5.
The agency also establishes new steps to control Salmonella and Campylobacter in poultry.
An emergency committee next week will consider if West Africa's Ebola outbreak is a health emergency as US officials prepare to airlift two sick American aid workers.
The neuraminidase inhibitor laninamivir, made by Biota Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Alpharetta, Ga., failed to perform better than a placebo at alleviating influenza symptoms in a phase 2 trial, the company said in a press release today, adding that it will no longer develop the drug.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has turned down a long-pending petition to declare antibiotic-resistant (ABR) Salmonella an adulterant in raw ground meat and poultry, saying there's not enough evidence to support the change.
The WHO will launch a $100 million plan tomorrow, and the CDC advises against nonessential travel.
Journal editors call for specific steps, while the ASM said it wants the NAS to weigh the risks and benefits.
Resistance to artemisinin, the main drug for treating malaria, has now spread throughout Southeast Asia, including critical border regions, and a genetic mutation in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease may be the culprit, according to a study today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
