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(CIDRAP News) – The 2003-2004 influenza season may already be past its peak, but it has claimed the lives of 93 children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – Another suspected SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) case was reported in southern China today, just as the man who had China's first SARS case since the end of last year's global outbreaks was released from a hospital.

A 20-year-old waitress with suspected SARS was being treated in isolation in a hospital in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, according to an online report by Xinhua, China's official news agency.

Jan 7, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – The avian influenza outbreak in South Korea showed signs of subsiding last week, but the disease turned up at a new site Jan 4, according to Korean newspaper reports.

The new case was confirmed at a duck farm in South Chungchong Province in the west-central part of the country, bringing the number of affected farms to 15, according to a Jan 5 report in the Korea Times.

(CIDRAP News) – A herd of 450 bull calves that includes the offspring of the nation's first cow known to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) will be euthanized as a precaution against the disease, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – Genetic tests have confirmed that the cow with the first known case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States came from a herd in Alberta, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – The suspected case of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in a 32-year-old man in southern China has been confirmed by laboratory tests, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

The case is the first in China and the first anywhere in someone other than a laboratory researcher since the end of the global SARS outbreaks last July.

(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally stated yesterday that the licensed anthrax vaccine is safe and effective for preventing all forms of anthrax, including inhalational anthrax, thereby undermining the rationale of a recent court injunction that halted the Pentagon's anthrax vaccination program.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture is banning the use of "downer" cattle for human food and taking several other new steps to keep beef products contaminated with the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) out of the food supply, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – The outbreak of avian influenza in South Korea has spread to at least 14 farms and triggered the culling of 1.2 million chickens and ducks since it was identified in mid-December, according to reports from Asian newspapers.

(CIDRAP News) – The Washington state cow announced by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Dec 23 to be a "presumptive positive" bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) case, was born in April 1997, before the August 1997 Food and Drug Administration ban on feeding ruminant-derived meat and bone meal supplements to cattle went into effect.

(CIDRAP News) – The Ministry of Health of China on Friday, Dec 26, told the World Health Organization (WHO) of a suspected case of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), according to a WHO update. The patient, a 32-year-old freelance television worker from the Panyu District of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, experienced fever and headache Dec 16 and sought medical help on the 20th.

(CIDRAP News) – In response to a federal judge's order this week, the Department of Defense (DoD) said it would suspend the anthrax vaccination program for military personnel.

"The Department will stop giving anthrax vaccinations until the legal situation is clarified," DoD officials said in a statement dated yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal officials took pains to assure the public today that the risk of contamination in the US beef supply is very low following yesterday's announcement that the nation's first apparent case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, had turned up in Washington state.

(CIDRAP News) – Stating that US soldiers should not be used as "guinea pigs for experimental drugs," a federal district judge in Washington, DC, yesterday granted a preliminary injunction against the Department of Defense's (DoD's) mandatory anthrax vaccination program.

(CIDRAP News) – No more SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) cases have cropped up in the wake of the single case reported in Taiwan last week, and quarantine or self-monitoring orders for most of the patient's contacts have been lifted.

(CIDRAP News) – Forty-two children have died recently of influenza-related causes, and at least some of them had no underlying health problems, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – Britain's health secretary reported this week what could be the world's first case of a person contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from a blood transfusion.

John Reid told the House of Commons that a person who died recently of vCJD had received blood in 1996 from a donor who became ill with vCJD in 1999 and died soon afterward.

(CIDRAP News) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday issued guidelines for using antiviral drugs to prevent and treat influenza during the current season.

The guidelines cover the use of four antivirals—oseltamivir, zanamivir, amantadine, and rimantadine. The CDC emphasizes using the medications to control flu outbreaks in nursing homes and other institutions housing people at high risk for flu complications.

(CIDRAP News) – Thirty-six states had "widespread" influenza outbreaks by the end of last week, 12 more states than faced that situation a week earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today.

All western states except South Dakota and Alaska had widespread flu, meaning outbreaks in at least half their regions, the CDC says in the Dec 19 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

(CIDRAP News) – A Taiwanese scientist has contracted SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), probably while studying the SARS coronavirus in a laboratory, the Taiwan Department of Health reported today.