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(CIDRAP News) – The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the most important lesson gleaned from examining the anthrax exposures in US Postal Service (USPS) facilities in 2001 is that agencies must err on the side of caution to protect people from uncertain and potentially life-threatening risks.

(CIDRAP News) – The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, may have acquired its lethal traits by shedding genes found in a closely related bacterium that is less dangerous, according to a recent study.

(CIDRAP News) – Avian influenza and other diseases that originated in animals show that the World Health Organization (WHO) needs to pay more attention to animal health, the WHO's regional director for the Western Pacific said at an international conference yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – New outbreaks of avian influenza in a monitoring zone in northern Malaysia have prompted the government to increase its surveillance to cover the entire state of Kelantan, according to news service reports.

(CIDRAP News) – A test of smallpox vaccine made by Aventis Pasteur in the 1950s show it is still effective even when diluted, suggesting that the United States has more than enough vaccine for everyone, according to a report this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

(CIDRAP News) – An 18-year-old boy in Thailand who had been exposed to sick chickens died yesterday of H5N1 avian influenza, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – By sifting data from hundreds of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) cases in Hong Kong, researchers there have developed a scoring system for predicting whether a patient with suspicious signs and symptoms has the disease.

(CIDRAP News) – West Nile fever, usually considered a relatively benign manifestation of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, can be a prolonged, serious illness, according to a study published Sep 7 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – Vietnamese officials have blamed the Sep 5 death of a 14-month-old boy on avian influenza, according to news reports from Vietnam.

(CIDRAP News) – A case of Lassa fever in a New Jersey man who fell ill after visiting Liberia has caused federal health officials to issue a health advisory about the viral disease, rarely seen in the United States.

(CIDRAP News) – House cats can acquire H5N1 avian influenza and pass it on to other cats, Dutch researchers reported this week.

Last February two cats in Thailand reportedly died of H5N1 avian flu, but yesterday's article in the online edition of Science apparently is the first report of cats being experimentally infected with the virus and then spreading it to other cats.

(CIDRAP News) – Another 210 cases of West Nile virus infection were reported in the past week, but the case count this year remains well below last year's number at this point, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

(CIDRAP News) – US Army and private researchers have developed a powdered anthrax vaccine that looks promising in initial animal studies and could eliminate the need for needle injections, according to the American Chemical Society (ACS).

(CIDRAP News) – Influenza viruses in 18% of a group of Japanese children who were treated with oseltamivir (Tamiflu) developed resistance to the antiviral drug, which is viewed as one of the key defenses against pandemic influenza, according to a new report in The Lancet.

(CIDRAP News) – Close to half of the nation's influenza vaccine doses will be shipped later than expected this fall, but everyone who wants a flu shot should ultimately be able to get it, federal health officials said today.

(CIDRAP News) – Chinese agricultural officials, seeking to allay concerns about recent reports that some pigs in China carried the H5N1 avian influenza virus, said yesterday that no pigs are currently infected.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials today released a lengthy plan for dealing with the potentially overwhelming threat of an influenza pandemic like those that occurred three times in the last century.

(CIDRAP News) – Four cases of infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Colorado have led an Illinois company to recall about 406,000 pounds of ground beef and beef steaks, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

(CIDRAP News) – Chinese health officials confirmed yesterday that H5N1 avian influenza had been found in pigs there in 2003 but says no such findings have occurred in 2004. They also stated that the occurrence had been made public earlier in the year, although the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says there has been no official report of the disease in pigs.

(CIDRAP News) – A step in the progression of avian influenza considered almost inevitable by experts in view of the widespread and continuing Asian outbreaks this year—its occurrence in pigs—has been taken, if a Chinese scientist's report is confirmed. Chen Hualan, director of China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, said at a conference today in Beijing that H5N1 avian flu had been found in pigs on several farms in the country this year and last.