All News

(CIDRAP News) – By sifting data from hundreds of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) cases in Hong Kong, researchers there have developed a scoring system for predicting whether a patient with suspicious signs and symptoms has the disease.

(CIDRAP News) – An 18-year-old boy in Thailand who had been exposed to sick chickens died yesterday of H5N1 avian influenza, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – West Nile fever, usually considered a relatively benign manifestation of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, can be a prolonged, serious illness, according to a study published Sep 7 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – A case of Lassa fever in a New Jersey man who fell ill after visiting Liberia has caused federal health officials to issue a health advisory about the viral disease, rarely seen in the United States.

(CIDRAP News) – Vietnamese officials have blamed the Sep 5 death of a 14-month-old boy on avian influenza, according to news reports from Vietnam.

(CIDRAP News) – House cats can acquire H5N1 avian influenza and pass it on to other cats, Dutch researchers reported this week.

Last February two cats in Thailand reportedly died of H5N1 avian flu, but yesterday's article in the online edition of Science apparently is the first report of cats being experimentally infected with the virus and then spreading it to other cats.

(CIDRAP News) – Another 210 cases of West Nile virus infection were reported in the past week, but the case count this year remains well below last year's number at this point, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

(CIDRAP News) – US Army and private researchers have developed a powdered anthrax vaccine that looks promising in initial animal studies and could eliminate the need for needle injections, according to the American Chemical Society (ACS).

(CIDRAP News) – Influenza viruses in 18% of a group of Japanese children who were treated with oseltamivir (Tamiflu) developed resistance to the antiviral drug, which is viewed as one of the key defenses against pandemic influenza, according to a new report in The Lancet.

(CIDRAP News) – Close to half of the nation's influenza vaccine doses will be shipped later than expected this fall, but everyone who wants a flu shot should ultimately be able to get it, federal health officials said today.

(CIDRAP News) – Chinese agricultural officials, seeking to allay concerns about recent reports that some pigs in China carried the H5N1 avian influenza virus, said yesterday that no pigs are currently infected.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials today released a lengthy plan for dealing with the potentially overwhelming threat of an influenza pandemic like those that occurred three times in the last century.

(CIDRAP News) – Four cases of infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Colorado have led an Illinois company to recall about 406,000 pounds of ground beef and beef steaks, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

(CIDRAP News) – Chinese health officials confirmed yesterday that H5N1 avian influenza had been found in pigs there in 2003 but says no such findings have occurred in 2004. They also stated that the occurrence had been made public earlier in the year, although the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says there has been no official report of the disease in pigs.

(CIDRAP News) – A distinctive group of symptoms—shortness of breath, impaired gag reflex, and absence of diarrhea—may be predictive of severe outcomes, including death, from foodborne botulism, a group of researchers reported recently.

(CIDRAP News) – A step in the progression of avian influenza considered almost inevitable by experts in view of the widespread and continuing Asian outbreaks this year—its occurrence in pigs—has been taken, if a Chinese scientist's report is confirmed. Chen Hualan, director of China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, said at a conference today in Beijing that H5N1 avian flu had been found in pigs on several farms in the country this year and last.

(CIDRAP News) – H5N1 avian influenza has today been confirmed in a privately owned flock of chickens in northern Malaysia near the Thai border. The country joins three others, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, in which the disease has resurfaced in recent weeks following the widespread outbreaks across Asia earlier in the year.

(CIDRAP News) – The cases of three people who died recently in Vietnam have now been confirmed by that country as being caused by the H5N1 strain, and two other patients are suspected of having the disease, according to news sources yesterday and today.

(CIDRAP News) – New findings suggest that far more people may be susceptible to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) than was previously supposed, according to a report in the Aug 7 Lancet.

(CIDRAP News) – Two studies from Colorado show that the 2003-04 influenza vaccine provided some protection even though it didn't match up well with the predominant flu virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.