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(CIDRAP News) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is inviting comments on its Public Health Protection Research Guide 2006-2015. Individuals can review the guide and offer comments on what future research avenues should be adopted to better protect health.

(CIDRAP News) – State and local health officials from around the nation today voiced qualified support for a federal government plan to hold a "summit" meeting on pandemic influenza preparedness in every state over the next few months.

(CIDRAP News) – A test to screen blood and organ donors for West Nile virus (WNV) has won approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after 2 years of trial use.

The FDA yesterday announced approval of the Procleix West Nile virus assay, developed by Gen-Probe Inc., San Diego, and marketed by Chiron Corp., Emeryville, Calif. The test detects West Nile RNA in blood.

(CIDRAP News) – Romania has reported three new outbreaks of avian influenza this week, while a mild strain of avian flu has surfaced in North Carolina turkeys, according to news services.

Dozens of chickens were found dead in the southeastern Romanian villages of Bumbacari and Dudescu, which lie outside the Danube River delta, according to Agence France-Presse and Bloomberg News reports. The viral strain was not listed.

(CIDRAP News) – Contaminated vegetables and fruits caused more cases of disease in recent years than poultry, eggs, or other food groups did, according to a recent report by the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

(CIDRAP News) – Close to 400 people in Ontario have gotten sick in a Salmonella outbreak blamed on contaminated mung bean sprouts, according to Canadian news reports.

Toronto's health department ordered Toronto Sun Wah Trading on Nov 25 to stop distributing mung bean sprouts because of possible contamination with Salmonella, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care announced the same day.

(CIDRAP News) – An Indonesian woman who died in a Jakarta hospital yesterday has tested positive for H5N1 avian influenza, according to officials quoted in The Jakarta Post. Further testing is pending at a World Health Organization (WHO) reference laboratory in Hong Kong.

(CIDRAP News) – Researchers have found evidence of Ebola virus infection in three African species of bats that are eaten by humans, suggesting that bats may be a natural reservoir of the mysterious virus, according to a report published today in Nature.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today raised the possibility that Indonesia's latest confirmed case of H5N1 avian influenza was part of a family cluster of three cases.

(CIDRAP News) – The specter of pandemic influenza raises a raft of questions for businesses, and businesspeople who gathered in Bloomington, Minn., today urged their peers to quickly seek answers to those questions.

(CIDRAP News) – More than a third of the human cases of H5N1 avian influenza that occurred over a 19-month period were clustered within families, suggesting the possibility that some family members caught the virus from others, according to a recent report.

(CIDRAP News) – Two more human cases of H5N1 avian influenza have been confirmed in recent days in Vietnam and Indonesia, while poultry outbreaks are spreading in China and Romania.

(CIDRAP News) – A 35-year-old woman who died Tuesday in China's Anhui province had the third confirmed human case of H5N1 avian influenza in China, according to Xinhua, the country's government news service.

(CIDRAP News) – China's ambitious goal of vaccinating all its poultry against H5N1 avian influenza may be impossible and could even backfire by helping to spread the virus, according to experts quoted in recent news reports.

Chinese officials announced Nov 15 the aim of vaccinating the country's estimated current stock of 5.2 billion poultry, most of which are in small backyard flocks. Officials said China raises 14 billion birds annually.

(CIDRAP News) – About 250 wild swans died of an H5 avian flu virus infection on the Volga River delta in southern Russia, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report yesterday that cited Russian news agencies. Tests to determine if the strain was H5N1 had not been completed.

As a result of the swan die-off, a quarantine was being enforced in an area near the city of Astrakhan, AFP reported.

(CIDRAP News) – A second case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) has been reported in a US resident, although American authorities said he is thought to have contracted the illness in his native Britain.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials today proposed rule changes to make it easier for public health authorities to keep travelers from bringing infectious diseases into the United States or spreading them between states.

(CIDRAP News) – Preliminary tests indicate H5N1 avian influenza caused the death of a 35-year-old Indonesian man in Jakarta on Nov 19, according to a government official quoted today in the Jakarta Post.

However, Indonesia is awaiting confirmation from a World Health Organization (WHO) reference laboratory of what would be the country's eighth fatality from avian flu. WHO has already confirmed 11 cases, seven of them fatal, in Indonesia.

(CIDRAP News) – Canadian officials said yesterday they would destroy all the poultry on a British Columbia farm where a duck was found to be carrying a low-pathogenic H5 avian influenza virus.

That announcement came 2 days after the Canadian government reported the identification of a low-pathogenic strain of H5N1 virus in wild birds in Manitoba and other flu viruses in wild birds in British Columbia and Quebec.