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(CIDRAP News) – Public health officials in Canada yesterday announced that they have detected a new influenza strain—one that contains human seasonal flu and a swine flu virus—in two workers on a Saskatchewan hog farm.

The workers had mild illness and have recovered, and authorities are investigating a third suspected case, the Public Health Agency of Canada said in statement yesterday.

CDC releases pandemic H1N1 vaccine guidance

(CIDRAP News) – At the same time that the Obama Administration inaugurates new safety and enforcement standards for the agencies overseeing food production in the United States, one of those agencies—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—is taking steps to improve the flow of data revealing food-safety problems.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said today it will soon advise most countries to ease the volume of testing for novel H1N1 influenza and said testing related to recent oseltamivir-resistant cases has so far turned up no additional cases.

(CIDRAP News) – As President Obama's Food Safety Working Group announced its key steps today, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled sweeping new egg safety rules designed to reduce the burden of Salmonella illnesses in humans.

Jul 7, 2009

(CIDRAP News) – The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) recently released a plan to help emergency departments, first responders, and public health departments manage a surge in pandemic flu cases that many experts predict will happen this fall.

Jul 6, 2009

Jul 2, 2009

(CIDRAP News) – The novel H1N1 (swine) influenza now circling the globe causes more serious lung disease than seasonal flu strains and sheds from the lung and throat tissue where it reproduces at higher rates, according to two animal studies published today—findings that could explain autopsies and case reports of severe pneumonia as well as the virus's rapid spread.

World pandemic flu cases top 77,000

Jul 1, 2009

Editor's Note: CIDRAP's Promising Practices: Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Tools (www.publichealthpractices.org) online database showcases peer-reviewed practices, including useful tools to help others with their planning. This article is one of a series exploring the development of these practices. We hope that describing the process and context of these practices enhances pandemic planning.

(CIDRAP News) – A spokesman for Roche, the maker of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), said yesterday that Denmark's report of resistance to the drug in a patient with novel H1N1 (swine) influenza, the first reported finding of its kind, wasn't surprising and that the news underscores the importance of monitoring for any viral changes.

(CIDRAP News) – Novel H1N1 influenza can cause severe respiratory illness, profound lung damage, and death even in patients with no underlying conditions to make them vulnerable, a team of physicians from Mexico report in a rush article published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

(CIDRAP News) – To outside observers, the novel H1N1 virus spreading quickly to every corner of the globe must seem like it came out of nowhere, but the organism is a fourth generation of the 1918 pandemic virus and comes from an H1N1 family tree that is colorful and complex, according to two historical reviews that appear today in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Jun 29, 2009