All News

(CIDRAP News) – Five bulls having possible links to the Canadian cow that had mad cow disease were shipped into the United States, but it is unlikely that any of the bulls were infected with the disease, US officials said this week.

June 6, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – Starting next fall, meat companies will have to step up their efforts to keep Listeria monocytogenes out of deli meats and hot dogs, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced yesterday.

June 4, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – A quarantine on poultry and pet birds in the El Paso, Tex., area is expected to be lifted in the wake of a recent finding that exotic Newcastle disease (END) did not spread beyond the backyard flock where it turned up in April, according to Texas and New Mexico officials.

The quarantine was imposed on five counties in Texas and neighboring New Mexico Apr 10 after the disease was discovered in a flock in El Paso.

(CIDRAP News) – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the recent detection of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in a Canadian cow shows that active surveillance programs for BSE are working.

"The identification of a single case of BSE is not a cause for panic," Andrew Speedy of the FAO's Animal Production and Health Division said in a news release from the agency's Rome headquarters.

(CIDRAP News) – Available diagnostic tests for SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) are not sensitive enough to reliably detect the SARS virus in the first few days of illness, a limitation that makes the disease harder to control, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

(CIDRAP News) – The debut of irradiated ground beef in school cafeterias grew more likely yesterday with the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) announcement that it will make the product available to schools starting next January.

(CIDRAP News) – A federally funded pilot project to inform people in three Minnesota school districts about food irradiation is moving toward completion despite a few rough spots, including the withdrawal of one district and outspoken opposition from some parents in another.

(CIDRAP News) – The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has again recommended a pause for evaluation of the federal smallpox vaccination program before it is expanded to more health workers and to emergency responders.

(CIDRAP News) – Initial testing of more than 370 cattle from several herds in Alberta's investigation into bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) detected no cases beyond the single case revealed May 20, according to Canadian agriculture officials.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today lifted its recommendation against travel to Hong Kong and China's Guangdong province, signaling that the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak is declining in its original strongholds.

Both places have fewer than 60 patients who are still infectious, and the average number of new cases per day has hovered at less than five in recent days, WHO officials said in a news release.

(CIDRAP News) – A hospital laundry worker in Taiwan who was sick for 6 days before he was recognized as having SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) may have exposed more than 10,000 people to the disease and helped derail Taiwan's previously effective containment effort, according to US health officials.

(CIDRAP News) – A 38-year-old man who had a seizure a few weeks after receiving a smallpox shot may have the first case of postvaccinial encephalitis in the current civilian smallpox vaccination program, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

(CIDRAP News) – The United States remains underinvested in public health even though terrorism and new diseases like SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) have raised the public health system's profile, the nation's top disease-prevention leader told public health graduates at the University of Minnesota yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – Postmortem tests have confirmed that a cow from an Alberta farm had bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, Canadian officials announced today. The news marked the first known BSE case in North America since another Alberta case was found in 1993.

(CIDRAP News) – In a study of 75 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) patients from the Amoy Gardens outbreak in Hong Kong, most patients improved after a few days of hospitalization but then worsened in their second week of illness, possibly because of an overly intense immune response to the virus.

(CIDRAP News) – The devastating outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the Netherlands is showing signs of losing steam, and a smaller outbreak in neighboring Belgium has been halted, according to European officials.

(CIDRAP News) – Recommended infection control precautions apparently failed to protect nine Toronto hospital staff members from contracting SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) while caring for a critically ill SARS patient, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – In new guidelines for obtaining federal bioterrorism preparedness funds, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is urging states to press on with their smallpox vaccination efforts and other smallpox response planning.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials say businesses and universities should go ahead with meetings and events, such as graduation ceremonies, that include travelers from areas affected by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today expressed closely guarded optimism that SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) can be contained.

"Experiences in a growing number of countries indicate that the disease can be contained, thus supporting WHO's overall objective: to prevent SARS from becoming widely established as another new disease in humans," the organization said in its online update.