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Officials reported more than 62,000 new chikungunya cases in the Caribbean and surrounding areas last week—almost all in the Dominican Republic—expanding the outbreak to 576,000 cases, according to an Aug 8 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
Along with the agency's declaration came an emergency committee's list of steps to limit disease spread.
The Obama administration is setting up an Ebola working group to consider making policy for the possible use of experimental drugs in West Africa's Ebola epidemic, Reuters reported yesterday, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lifted a barrier to the potential use of an unlicensed drug made by a Canadian company.
An official of a leading aid group asserts that inaction by the rest of the world has let the disease get out of control.
Liberia and Sierra Leone have taken new actions to curb infections, as response activities and testing of possible travel-related cases play out on other continents.
This year's tally of US chikungunya cases related to foreign travel, mostly to the Caribbean, has risen to 484, an increase of 86 over the past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.
Forty states have reported cases, three more than a week ago, the agency said in an Aug 5 update. The number of locally acquired cases stayed at four, all of them in Florida.
With the situation in Nigeria worsening, CDC takes an action it last took during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.
Treatment of two US citizens with an Ebola drug raises ethical questions over who should get scarce, unlicensed drugs.
Long-term treatment with a newer artemisinin-based combination drug for malaria, dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP), substantially and safely reduces the risk of malaria in young children, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published online yesterday in PLoS Medicine.
CDC experts cover a range of issues, such as proper protective equipment.
The second American infected with Ebola returned home today, as new information emerged about experimental treatment use and more possible cases.
Two leading experts urge both sides in the debate to keep an open mind and to set up a conference.
An H5N1 avian flu virus that killed a Canadian woman in January had two uncommon mutations that may have helped increase its ability to bind to human cells, researchers from Singapore and Canada reported yesterday in a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
An enhanced system of surveillance for MERS-CoV in England turned up 2 cases of the disease among 77 potential candidates meeting case definitions in its first year of operation, according to a dispatch yesteday in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The numbers are small, say the authors, but in the context of emerging pathogens, reporting data like theirs can help optimize case detection and surveillance systems.
A US doctor with Ebola is improving and new cases have been reported in Morocco and Nigeria, as the outbreak reaches 1,603 cases and 887 deaths.
About two thirds of the 38,000 new cases reported last week were in the Dominican Republic.
A World Health Organization (WHO) emergency committee has extended a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) over the global polio situation and the temporary recommendations that came with it, the WHO said in a statement yesterday. The group met by teleconference on Jul 31, its first meeting since it first declared the PHEIC on May 5.
An emergency committee next week will consider if West Africa's Ebola outbreak is a health emergency as US officials prepare to airlift two sick American aid workers.
The agency also establishes new steps to control Salmonella and Campylobacter in poultry.
The neuraminidase inhibitor laninamivir, made by Biota Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Alpharetta, Ga., failed to perform better than a placebo at alleviating influenza symptoms in a phase 2 trial, the company said in a press release today, adding that it will no longer develop the drug.
