South Korea today reported its first confirmed MERS-CoV case in 5 days, in a nurse who works at Samsung Medical Center, the hardest-hit facility in the country's large healthcare-linked outbreak. The latest illness raises the total to 183.
A recommendation for occupational use was tabled until the vaccine becomes available.
Iowa has gone 2 weeks without an outbreak and Minnesota almost 4, as researchers find viable H5N2 in farm air samples.
For the third day in a row South Korea reported no new MERS-CoV cases, but its health ministry today reported one more death, involving an 81-year-old woman who had a stoke before she was diagnosed, the Korea Times reported today. The woman was exposed to the virus while at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul.
The predicted summer break in H5N2 avian influenza activity is growing longer in hard-hit Minnesota and Iowa, allowing more areas to be released from quarantine and more poultry farms to restock their barns.
A 3-year-old girl in Faiyum governorate has contracted H5N1 avian flu, health officials confirmed in media reports translated by FluTrackers, an infectious disease message board.
The case interrupts a 2-month lull in the country, which has been hit with a spate of cases this year and has now confirmed 144 H5N1 cases since Jan 1, according to a list maintained by FluTrackers.
Chinese researchers who analyzed influenza viruses from poultry in live-bird markets say they have discovered a novel H5N9 virus that represents a hybrid of the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus and a human H7N9 virus, along with other elements.
Three weeks of follow-up testing on a big Nebraska egg farm never confirmed preliminary tests that showed avian influenza there, prompting an end to the quarantine of the farm, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) announced yesterday.
Iowa ended an 8-day quiet spell today with the report of a new avian influenza outbreak on a chicken farm, while Nebraska reported that the virus was found on a farm that was already being depopulated because of outbreaks at neighboring farms.
Initial studies of how the H5N2 virus invades poultry farms point to no one clear factor, the USDA says.
