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An emergency committee established to advise the World Health Organization (WHO) on Ebola outbreak response steps met for the seventh time last week and today announced that ongoing transmission and other factors still meet the threshold for a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) as defined by the International Health Regulations.
The NSABB plans to release final recommendations in spring 2016.
Healthcare workers (HCWs) in Guinea last year had an incidence of Ebola virus disease 42 times higher than non-HCWs, and lab technicians, physicians, and men were especially hit hard, according to a report today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
Two of four Jordan cases involve health workers, and contact info in a Riyadh case is being probed.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is funding two projects to aid in developing better seasonal flu vaccines and in improving pandemic flu preparedness, the agency said in a news release yesterday.
NewLink Genetics today announced that the federal government has exercised an $18 million option to ramp up the production of its experimental Ebola vaccine VSV-EBOV, according to a statement from the company. The company has licensed the vaccine from the Public Health Agency of Canada, the developer of the vaccine, which is furthest along in clinical studies in the West African outbreak region.
In other developments, the HHS announced more funding for a rapid Ebola test.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received reports of 113 additional cases of salmonellosis likely linked to cucumbers in the past week, raising the outbreak total to 671, the agency said in an update yesterday.
One treatment is a new type of antiviral targeted for hospitalized patients, and the second is a monoclonal antibody.
Blanket screening of all immigrants for tuberculosis (TB)—as is done in Canada, the United States, Australia, and some European countries—wastes resources and should instead focus on only those arriving from high-risk countries, according to a study from University of Toronto researchers published yesterday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ).
US officials need to ramp up active surveillance for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5 viruses and focus on vulnerable regions to prepare for a likely reintroduction of the disease this fall, US Geological Survey (USGS) experts said in a commentary yesterday in Virology Journal.
A case update from the WHO showed a variety of exposure types, with some unknown.
Sierra Leone's last two Ebola patients were released from treatment yesterday, starting the 42-day countdown toward Ebola-free status, Xinhua, China's state news agency, reported today. The patients were both released from a treatment center in Makeni, in the northern part of the country.
A UC–Santa Cruz team has developed a chip-based method to directly detect Ebola.
The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is falling short in its mission in several ways, such as lack of timely information to its partners, poor partner participation, and difficulty prioritizing some activities, and might even need to be discontinued, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report yesterday.
Saudi Arabia had gone 2 days without reporting a case.
Both the H3N2 and B strains will differ in next year's Southern Hemisphere trivalent flu vaccine.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is hiring a top official to ensure lab safety after a report released late last week highlighted biosafety weakness in the agency's labs, USA Today reported yesterday.
Sierra Leone reports no cases after having 5 last week, and new funds for drugs and vaccines are announced.
Kuwaiti health officials have notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about a fatal MERS-CoV case, in a 78-year-old man from Kuwait City who owned camels and had frequent contact with them, according to a WHO statement today.
