All News

(CIDRAP News) – An epidemiologic investigation of 52 cases of Salmonella infection in 17 states, most of them in children, has prompted a nationwide recall of a snack called Veggie Booty, federal health agencies reported yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today confirmed two H5N1 cases from Vietnam dating back to late May and early June.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today banned importation of five types of farmed Chinese seafood because of contamination with outlawed antimicrobial drugs, including one that can spawn antibiotic resistance.

How are you explaining the current risk of an H5N1-related influenza pandemic to your boss, the emergency preparedness committee, or the executive suite today? Is the task daunting? Are you being waved off with the comment that all this attention to pandemic preparedness is just public health's version of Y2K?

(CIDRAP News) – Blocking proposals stemming from notorious foodborne-disease outbreaks last year, a California State Assembly committee yesterday rejected one bill aimed at reducing contamination in leafy greens and stalled voting on two others, despite the State Senate's earlier approval of all three.

(CIDRAP News) – The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued two reports that address avian and pandemic influenza planning last week, one examining how well the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is prepared to respond to avian flu outbreaks and the other assessing efforts by US and international agencies to help vulnerable countries.

(CIDRAP News) – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today said H5N1 avian influenza virus is entrenched in some places and will continue to spread, despite improved control efforts.

As if to underscore the message, new poultry outbreaks were reported today in the Czech Republic and Bangladesh, and more wild birds were reported infected in Germany.

(CIDRAP News) – Limited supplies of prepandemic influenza vaccine may prevent more illness cases overall if they are administered to more people in lower-than-recommended doses, University of Hong Kong researchers contend in a study published this month in Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released a new software tool to make it easier and quicker for food industry facilities to assess their risk of attacks involving biological, chemical, or radiological weapons.

(CIDRAP News) – Six wild birds in Germany have tested positive for the lethal strain of H5N1 avian influenza in the virus's first appearance in the country since last August, according to news services.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today confirmed two H5N1 avian influenza cases, one in a 4-year-old Egyptian boy and the other in a 3-year-old Indonesian girl.

The boy is from Qena governorate in southern Egypt. He got sick on Jun 20 and was admitted to the hospital the next day, where he is in stable condition, according to a WHO statement.

An official in the west African country of Togo confirmed today that poultry have tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus, raising the number of African nations hit by the virus to 10.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – Scientists are uncovering naturally occurring resistance in influenza to the antiviral drugs that can prevent or treat it, potentially complicating plans by international authorities and many countries to build large drug stockpiles as a hedge against a pandemic.

(CIDRAP News) – Agriculture officials in the Czech Republic today confirmed the country's first H5N1 avian influenza outbreak in poultry, while Vietnamese officials announced the death of another human H5N1 patient, the country's second in 2 weeks.

(CIDRAP News) – A study from the University of Iowa suggests that veterinarians who work with poultry have a significantly higher risk of infection with avian influenza, compared with nonveterinarians.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – Declining public interest in the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza and its pandemic potential has sparked alarm among animal-health experts, who worry that shifting priorities will derail the funding still needed to control the disease in birds.

(CIDRAP News) – US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt has announced plans to appoint a 13-member panel to advise him on biodefense issues, including chemical, biological, nuclear, and radiological threats to public health.

(CIDRAP News) – The company that markets oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in Japan has announced it will launch new studies to explore whether the antiviral drug contributes to adverse psychiatric and neurologic events in teenagers.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – The continuing debate over developing countries' ability to afford pandemic-influenza vaccines has produced a disturbing complication: the possibility that Indonesia and other countries affected by H5N1 avian flu will assert legal ownership of the viral isolates on which the vaccines would be based.

(CIDRAP News) – A series of illness outbreaks linked to tomatoes over the last decade prompted the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to announce last week an initiative to explore contamination causes and develop better guidance to reduce the number of tomato-related illnesses.