All News

(CIDRAP News) – Albany Medical College in Albany, N.Y., has received an $8.3 million federal grant to study pulmonary tularemia, with the main emphasis on developing a vaccine, college officials announced last week.

The grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will fund tularemia research at the college for 4½ years, the college said in a news release.

(CIDRAP News) – The Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in the Congo increased to a total of 47 cases with 18 deaths last week, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

(CIDRAP News) – The federal government is considering buying influenza vaccine from a British company in an effort to remedy a possible shortage in the United States, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today.

(CIDRAP News) – Signs of a shortage of influenza vaccine increased over the weekend with the announcement that the two leading manufacturers had shipped all the doses they had made.

(CIDRAP News) – Signs of an unusually bad influenza season increased this week as federal health officials reported widespread influenza in 13 states and hints of a possible vaccine shortage began to appear.

(CIDRAP News) – A 1999 outbreak of Salmonella infections scattered over 13 states was traced to Brazilian mangoes, which may have been contaminated when they were treated to kill Mediterranean fruit flies, according to a new study.

(CIDRAP News) – Systems for rapidly detecting contaminants in drinking water should be a high priority for federal funding to make the nation's water systems more secure, according to a group of experts consulted by Congress's General Accounting Office (GAO).

(CIDRAP News) – Contaminated alfalfa sprouts were the probable cause of at least six recent cases of Salmonella infection in Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS).

Harmony Farms, an Auburn, Wash., firm, has recalled alfalfa and onion sprouts from retail stores and restaurants throughout Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, the department announced last week.

(CIDRAP News) – In what appears to be the first case of its kind, a meatpacking plant in Dodge City, Kan., last week recalled about 26,600 pounds of ground beef because it was wrongly labeled as irradiated.

(CIDRAP News) – The death toll in the Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreak in the Congo has increased to 18, with a total of 36 cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported yesterday.

The outbreak involves two villages in the Mbomo district of the Cuvette Ouest Department. The villages are in the northwestern Congo, about 440 miles northwest of Brazzaville, the capital, according to a Reuters report.

(CIDRAP News) – A contaminated multipurpose building apparently was the source of Escherichia coli O157 exposure for at least 19 people who got sick after attending a county fair in Ohio in 2001, according to a study published this week.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) says the rate of Salmonella contamination in raw meat and poultry samples it has tested so far this year is down 16% from last year and 66% lower than the rate 6 years ago.

(CIDRAP News) – With a Dec 12 deadline approaching, fewer than 20% of food establishments that must register with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under new regulations for protecting the US food supply have done so, FDA officials said yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) last week announced a comprehensive research agenda for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its food safety programs.

The "unified food safety research agenda" ranges from studying the virulence of major foodborne pathogens to developing effective food-safety training strategies, the department said.

(CIDRAP News) – An outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in the Congo expanded to 24 cases last week, with 12 deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO reported Nov 17 that the Congo government had confirmed that the disease was Ebola, with 11 cases, all fatal, at that point. On Nov 21 the WHO reported another 13 cases, including one death.

(CIDRAP News) – An analysis of hepatitis A cases associated with a Chi Chi's restaurant near Pittsburgh points to green onions (scallions) from Mexico as the source of the virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said today that green onions (scallions) from three Mexican firms have been implicated in hepatitis A outbreaks that occurred in September, but the source of the current outbreak in the Pittsburgh area has not yet been identified.

(CIDRAP News) – Because someone who recently mailed a container of ricin remains at large, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is urging health workers to be alert for possible cases of ricin poisoning.

(CIDRAP News) – A combination of vaccines that included smallpox and anthrax might have contributed to the death of a young Army reservist last April, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced the start of the first human trial of a vaccine for Ebola virus infection, a currently untreatable disease that kills most of its victims.