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The first patient in the DRC's Ebola outbreak caught the virus from a dead animal, making any link to West Africa's outbreak unlikely.
The US government plans to request that federally funded laboratories suspend all work on potentially dangerous pathogens for about 24 hours to inventory stocks of microbes, ScienceInsider reported today.
Sequence analysis of human and environmental samples demonstrated that four strains of reassorted H7N9 avian flu viruses have been circulating in Guangdong province—one of the country's hardest hit—and that an increase of human cases last year coincided with an increase in H7 isolates in environmental samples, according to a study today in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
The WHO sent a team to a hot spot where one of its Ebola workers was infected.
Saudi Arabia reported another MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) case today, the second in 2 days, following a 13-day spell without any cases.
The new case involves a 52-year-old Saudi woman in Dammam, the same location as the case reported yesterday in a 60-year-old man. The new patient, who is not a healthcare worker, is hospitalized and has a preexisting disease, the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH) said.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday released guidance for handling the bodies of patients who die from Ebola infections. The advice is aimed at those performing postmortem care in US hospitals and mortuaries.
The WHO has heightened concerns about the impact the outbreak is having on frontline workers and the prospects of overseas help.
Ebola has struck the northern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but authorities say it is not the same strain as in West Africa.
Ohio last week reported a case of variant H3N2 (H3N2v) influenza in a person who had had close contact with pigs, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Aug 22, marking what appears to be the first such US case this summer.
The infected person was hospitalized but has recovered completely, the CDC said in its weekly FluView surveillance report.
As West Africa's Ebola toll climbed by 142 cases and 77 deaths, the WHO conceded that the size of the epidemic has been underestimated.
Two Palm Beach County, Fla., residents have acquired chikungunya locally, bringing the nation's total number of locally acquired cases to six, the Palm Beach Post reported yesterday.
State and county health officials said that a 43-year-old man and 35-year-old woman contracted the painful mosquito-borne disease without traveling to outbreak areas.
Four illnesses in four states have been confirmed in a Salmonella outbreak likely associated with recalled nut butter, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update yesterday.
Two medical missionaries are out of the hospital, leaving lessons for clinicians on treating the disease.
It's time to reassess strategies for controlling methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in hospitals, mainly because of poor evidence for the efficacy of screening and isolation, which have been regarded as the gold-standard approach, say three German and Swiss experts writing in The Lancet.
The WHO said service suspensions by shippers are starting to squeeze food and fuel supplies in Ebola-affected countries.
Researchers who sifted data from 12 recent influenza seasons in Finland concluded that about 42% of influenza B cases involved strains that were not targeted by the vaccine, which they say supports the inclusion of both influenza B lineages in seasonal flu vaccines.
The WHO said it saw some signs of improving control efforts and public awareness in Nigeria and Guinea.
In a study designed to simulate how the pandemic 2009 influenza (pH1N1) virus might have evolved, researchers say it took only nine passages in pigs for a virus to gain "greatly enhanced virulence and transmissibility" in pigs, guinea pigs, and ferrets.
Violence in a Monrovia slum was likely fueled by misconceptions about Ebola and suspicions about the actions of government officials and health workers.
The number of newly reported chikungunya cases in the Caribbean region was down dramatically last week, but it's not clear if the drop was related to delays in reporting or a downturn in disease transmission. According to an Aug 15 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the region reported 9,798 new cases, accounting for an increase of only 1.7%.
