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(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today denied a widely publicized report that countries dealing with H5N1 avian influenza have been refusing to share clinical samples from human patients, making it difficult for the WHO to monitor changes in the virus.

(CIDRAP News) – Sixteen people have fallen sick and one is hospitalized with Escherichia coli O157:H7, most of them after drinking milk shakes at a popular drive-in restaurant in Calgary, Alta.

(CIDRAP News) – Initial testing has shown that a man in northern Vietnam has H5N1 avian influenza, marking the first human case in more than 3 weeks, according to news reports today.

Initial tests were positive for Cao The Hai, 55, from Vinh Phuc province, according to Dr. Nguyen Thi Tuong Van of the Institute of Tropical Diseases in Hanoi. The news was reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP) today.

(CIDRAP News) – State health departments have improved their terrorism preparedness capabilities since 2001, but some of the improvement might have come at the expense of other public health programs, says a report released today.

(CIDRAP News) – An initial human trial of a West Nile virus (WNV) vaccine has yielded promising results, officials said today.

In the double-blind, randomized trial, all but one of the people who received the vaccine developed antibodies to it, according to an Associated Press (AP) report quoting Dr. Thomas Monath, chief scientist at Acambis, the company that created the vaccine.

(CIDRAP News) – The Pacific Northwest could have a higher risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) than the rest of the country because of past cattle imports from western Canada, where all four BSE cases in North America originated, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported recently.

(CIDRAP News) – Angola has had 2 days in the past week with no new cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, suggesting that the country is getting closer to controlling the epidemic, Agence-France Presse (AFP) reported today.

Angolan Health Minister Sebastiao Veloso put the Marburg death toll at 284, the report said. That compares with 280 deaths out of a total of 313 cases reported by AFP a week ago. Today's story didn't list the case total.

Editor's note: This story was revised shortly after publication to reflect corrections issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on May 10. The corrections pertain to the total monetary amount of the grants and to the project descriptions for XOMA (US) LLC and DVC Dynport LLC.

(CIDRAP News) – Fifteen cases of multidrug-resistant Salmonella infection have been traced to contact with hamsters, mice, and rats, marking the first human salmonellosis outbreak linked to pet rodents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will soon receive the first of 5 million doses of anthrax vaccine for civilian biodefense under a $122.7 million contract that was awarded today.

(CIDRAP News) – A bleak picture of the world's ability to cope with an influenza pandemic is painted in an essay by infectious-disease and bioterrorism expert Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – After an arduous 10-month battle against the H5N1 avian influenza virus, Thailand has declared itself free of the disease, the Bangkok Post reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – Those deemed at highest risk from influenza should have priority for flu vaccinations this fall, federal health officials said yesterday.

"We want flu shots in their arms first," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC), told members of Congress, according to several news reports. "If the vaccine comes through as expected, we'll do the rest."

(CIDRAP News) – Vietnam is moving forward with a plan to fight the spread of avian influenza by vaccinating roughly 600,000 chickens in Ho Chi Minh City, according to news reports today.

A vaccine produced by a French company called Merial will be administered to chickens on commercial farms this month, the Associated Press (AP) reported today, citing Phan Xuan Thao, deputy director of the city's animal health department.

(CIDRAP News ) – With a federal judge's permission, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced it will resume giving anthrax shots to military personnel, but on a strictly voluntary basis.

(CIDRAP News) – Academic researchers will join with a drug manufacturer in the United Kingdom to screen hundreds of thousands of compounds in a hunt for a treatment for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), British officials announced recently.

Editor's note: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CIDRAP News on May 4 that the total number of laboratories that received test kits containing H2N2 virus samples from Meridian Bioscience Inc. was 4,614, rather than more than 6,000, as stated in this story.

(CIDRAP News) – Thirty-eight new cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever have been reported in the northern Angola province of Uige in the past few days, despite hopes that the outbreak was being contained.

(CIDRAP News) – In a recent study, some laboratory and public health workers who received smallpox shots reported several side effects that have not shown up in other studies, including joint and abdominal pain, backache, and breathing difficulty.

(CIDRAP News) – Only a few new cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever have been reported in Angola in the past week, but recent lapses in hospital infection control have raised a risk of prolonging the epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.