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(CIDRAP News) – Indonesia recently announced two new H5N1 avian influenza deaths, and Egypt today said a 2-year-old boy tested positive for the disease, as the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed two other cases: a Laotian woman who died and a 10-year-old Egyptian girl who is recovering.

(CIDRAP News) – Egyptian authorities reported a case of H5N1 avian influenza in a 10-year-old girl yesterday, marking the country's seventh case this year and 25th overall.

The girl was admitted to a hospital in Aswan, 450 kilometers south of Cairo, Mar 13, with fever and muscle pains, according to a Reuters report based on information from MENA, the state news agency.

Exercises—whether simple or complex—can greatly help a business prepare, regardless of its stage of pandemic planning.

Weekly Briefing interviewed pandemic preparedness planners from two Fortune 500 companies to find out how they are using exercises and what they are learning. For both, scenarios changed as the exercise progressed. We present one here. Look for the second one in an upcoming article on designing, conducting, and evaluating tabletop exercises.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said yesterday it would step up its antismuggling efforts and monitoring of live bird markets this year to protect the country from H5N1 avian influenza.

The agency plans to more than double the number of special operations to seize banned poultry products and will expand the monitoring of live bird markets from 12 states to 29 or 30, officials said at a press briefing yesterday afternoon.

(CIDRAP News) –Indonesia vowed today not to share H5N1 avian influenza virus samples with the World Health Organization (WHO) until it has a "legally binding" guarantee that the samples won't be used to develop vaccines that the country can't afford, according to news services.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today issued a pandemic influenza preparedness plan that defines the agency's current role in federal pandemic planning, such as expediting the review of new vaccines and antivirals, and spells out work it will do in areas such as food safety and targeting counterfeit drugs.

Editor's note: This story was revised Mar 14 to correct a misquote, introduced in editing, that was attributed to Michael T. Osterholm and to include qualifying details that were omitted from the earlier version.

Editor's note: This story was revised Mar 13 to list the correct title for Nega Beru, PhD, director of the Office of Food Safety in the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

(CIDRAP News) – The accumulation of human cases of H5N1 avian influenza continued with the reporting of one case each in Egypt and Indonesia in the past 2 days.

Officials in Egypt said a 4-year-old boy from the Nile delta town of Daqahliya tested positive yesterday, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report published yesterday. The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the case in a notice today.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal officials tracking a large Salmonella outbreak linked to certain peanut butter brands announced that the number of sickened patients has grown by 55 to a total of 425 cases in 44 states, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a press release this week.

(CIDRAP News) – The first fully automated test to screen donors of blood, tissue, and organs for West Nile virus (WNV) was recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Sep 11 attacks, and Hurricane Katrina have given many senior executives a small taste of the economic devastation that unforeseen localized events can wreak on a company.

Some pandemic influenza preparedness planners start out with an advantage. Their company culture supports disaster preparedness and senior executives have educated themselves on the threat—or the CEO "has a certain degree of paranoia" as Boyd George, CEO of the Hickory, NC–based grocery supplier Alex Lee, puts it. He had read a book about the 1918 influenza pandemic that alarmed him.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed the first fatal case of H5N1 avian influenza in Laos, involving a 15-year-old girl, while Chinese officials have denied new research claims that several strains of the virus originated in Guangdong province.

Michael Evangelides, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, extracted the following information from three surveys of corporate preparedness conducted in 2005 and 2006 by Deloitte's Center for Health Solutions and Deloitte Consulting with guidance from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP). Among the executives he surveyed, Evangelides found:

The pandemic worst case is:

(a) Truly horrific(b) Truly unlikely(c) Truly worth planning for(d) All of the above

The right answer: (d) All of the above.

(CIDRAP News) – Only about 29% of the 6.5 million American children with asthma, a group at risk for influenza complications, received flu shots in the 2004-05 season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today.

(CIDRAP News) – Some professors at the University of Iowa think that a kind of betting system may help predict the timing and extent of the next influenza pandemic, and a large health foundation is betting they are right.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal officials recently proposed a timetable to begin implementing a new meat and poultry inspection system designed to reduce foodborne illnesses by focusing more attention on high-risk facilities and those with poor safety records.