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Provincial health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC's) North Kivu province yesterday reported two more Ebola cases, one of them more than 90 miles from Butembo, the main epicenter, according to Reuters.
The new cases raise the outbreak total to six, with the number of deaths remaining at two. One of the new patients is from Katwa, about 6 miles from Butembo. The other is from Manguredjipa, about 93 miles away.
More than 20.5 million years of life may have been lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Scientific Reports study published yesterday. The study also reports that, compared with the median mortality rate of the seasonal flu, COVID-19 deaths may be two to nine times higher.
Lab studies point to lower protection against the variant first identified in South Africa.
The WHO is deploying 100 staff and, for Guinea, has released $1.25 million to support local control efforts.
A single high dose did not affect hospital and ICU stay or the need for a ventilator.
Also, the White House says it will spend $650 million to expand testing for schools and congregate settings.
Elsewhere, the WHO launches a plan to battle COVID-19 in 2021; it needs $2 billion to meet its 6 goals.
The AMR Action Fund announced today the appointment of a new chief executive officer and more than $140 million in investments from the Boehringer Ingleheim Foundation, The European Investment Bank, and the Wellcome Trust.
An analysis by Canadian researchers suggests that a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is highly efficacious, according to a letter published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
The B117 variant has now been detected in 94 countries, with local transmission occurring in 47.
The authors conclude that pregnant women should be broadly prioritized for COVID-19 vaccine allocation.
"For months the scientific evidence has been clear: Aerosol transmissions are a major way this virus spreads."
Almost one in five meat processing workers in Nebraska contracted COVID-19 from April to July 2020, but after facility-wide mitigations and strategies were put in place, new cases appeared to decrease, according to an Emerging Infectious Diseases report yesterday. The researchers found that men and Hispanic/Latinos showed the highest burden in case numbers and severity.
New research by scientists from China and the United Kingdom shows that three widely used herbicides increase the prevalence of antibiotic resistance genes in soil bacteria, along with the mobile genetic elements that enable those genes to move between bacteria. The research appeared yesterday in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Demand surges in pharmacy and hospital prescriptions reflect early changes in COVID treatment.
Also, COVID-related cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children have reached 2,060.
The in-hospital death rate early in the pandemic was 31% but declined significantly within months.
South Africa officials say they'll share AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine with other African nations.
Biotechnology company Adaptive Phage Therapeutics (APT) announced last week that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its Investigational New Drug (IND) application for bacteriophage therapy for the treatment of prosthetic joint infections (PJIs).
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect bacteria and can be used to fight bacterial infections.
COVID-19 patients in a Warsaw, Poland, hospital had a significantly lower mortality rate when treated with convalescent plasma, especially early, according to a study published yesterday in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.
