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The World Health Organization (WHO) today issued a statement offering new details on 6 cases of MERS-CoV reported on Jun 19 and 20 in Saudi Arabia. Four of the cases are related to the current outbreak at King Khalid University Hospital in Riyadh.
Also, agencies publish guidance on Olympics travel and lab testing, and New York City officials outline their Zika response.
The WHO details 20 cases involving the King Khalid University Hospital in Riyadh, and new cases are confirmed in both the UAE and in Jeddah.
A study published in the July issue of The Lancet Global Health notes that weakness, fever, distress, and diarrhea were common symptoms in children under the age of 5 years who were being treated for Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa, and many presented without a fever.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals will launch a phase 1 clinical trial of a DNA-based vaccine.
Riyadh has 9 new cases, with at least 8 of them tied to a hospital cluster, and the WHO details 6 earlier cases.
A 4-year-old girl in China's Guangdong province is sick with an H9N2 avian influenza infection, according to a translated report posted Jun 18 by FluTrackers, an infectious disease message board.
Yellow fever in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been declared an epidemic in three provinces as officials report 1,000 suspected cases, Reuters reported today.
The disease persists in Angola, local cases were reported in a new part of the DRC's Kinshasa province, and investigators are looking at cases in other nations.
For a second day in a row, Saudi Arabia reported several cases from Riyadh, many asymptomatic and linked to healthcare setting exposure.
The same test is in use at a Houston-area blood center, with some others facilities in the southern United States planning to start testing.
The World Health Organization (WHO) today announced the rollout of an updated strategy to fight Zika virus, covering response steps over the next 18 months. It said it needs $121.9 million to carry out the strategy.
The CDC notes 6 instances of Zika-linked birth defects, 3 involving live births.
Steps include added lab capacity, a sequencing database, and boosts for drug development.
Two of the patients are healthcare workers, and the other 3 were exposed via household contact.
Foodborne illness patterns are generally similar when comparing outbreaks with sporadic infections, except in some instances for children, according to an analysis of the characteristics of four bacteria monitored by surveillance sites that are part of the US FoodNet system.
An outbreak of an especially large and severe enterovirus A71 (EV-A71) outbreak in kids younger than 10 in Spain's Catalonia region that began in the middle of April has so far sickened 87, with 22 still in the hospital, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said today in a risk assessment.
All 4 babies with microcephaly were born to asymptomatic women.
The new MERS-CoV clade was implicated in a surge of 2015 illnesses.
The MCR-1 resistance gene, which has now been detected in at least 20 countries and renders bacteria resistant to the last-resort antibiotic colistin, poses a "substantial public health risk" to the European Union and must be combatted on a range of fronts, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said today in its latest rapid risk assessment.
