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Testing has confirmed that a fourth undergraduate student has been infected in a meningococcal disease outbreak involving the less common serogroup B at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), according to a Dec 2 statement from the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department (SBCPHD). All four students were sickened within 3 weeks in November.
Authorities are monitoring incoming travelers for disease and have quarantined 17 close contacts of the first H7N9 avian flu patient identified in Hong Kong, its Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said today in a statement.
Findings include risky handling of ground beef and chicken and poor shipping of leafy greens.
The US flu season is picking up, and 2009 H1N1 is the dominant strain so far.
The United States has committed up to $5 billion for global efforts to fight AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria over the next 3 years, representing a $1 billion increase over the last 3-year pledge, said a PR Newswire release yesterday.
A 36-year-old woman is in critical condition, raising Hong Kong's response level to 'serious,' while the mainland confirms its fifth case this fall.
MERS-CoV has struck three family members, one fatally, and was found in camels linked to patients.
An expert on variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of the animal malady known as mad cow disease, claims that the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) has neglected to employ recently developed methods of sterilizing surgical instruments used on patients with the disease, thus putting subsequent surgical patients at risk, said a story last week in The Independent.
Oregon's senior state epidemiologist, William Keene, PhD, MPH, died yesterday at the age of 56 after a 2-week hospitalization for acute pancreatitis, according to a story in The Oregonian.
Princeton University will offer a vaccine that includes the outbreak strain starting Dec 9.
The influenza vaccine did not reduce the risk of hospitalization for flu after vaccine failure, according to an analysis of 8 years of data published yesterday in Vaccine.
Data show H1N1 deaths skewed toward young and reflect wide regional variance.
Studies show that antivirals up to 3 days after flu symptom onset can benefit, but their use is down in hospitalized kids.
The World Health Organization (WHO) today confirmed three cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection in Saudi Arabia that the country's Ministry of Health (MOH) first reported last week. Two of the cases proved fatal.
As has been the pattern with Saudi MERS-CoV cases, the WHO report contained little information on the cases.
Flu vaccine effectiveness (VE) varied from 44% to 53% over the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons among pregnant women, and getting a flu shot the previous year appeared to be just as effective as getting the current year's vaccine, according to a study in Clinical Infectious Diseases today.
The agency's alert follows meningitis outbreaks at two colleges involving a strain not found in the vaccine.
Construction has begun on a plant in north Florida that will enable the Department of Defense (DoD) to produce its own vaccines and drugs against potential bioterror threats, an effort that appears to duplicate Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) efforts, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The FDA approves the first adjuvanted H5N1 flu vaccine to aid in pandemic preparedness.
The WHO says MERS is likely sustained by both human-to-human spread and infection from animals.
US flu activity stays steady overall, but reports of flulike illness in the South grow.
