The toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC's) Ebola outbreak reached 62 cases and 35 deaths as of Sep 9, including 7 fatal cases in healthcare workers, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced yesterday.
The new numbers compare with 53 cases and 31 deaths reported on Sep 2. The outbreak involves a different Ebola virus species from the one circulating in West Africa and is a separate event.
The rate of two important healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) in critically ill children decreased substantially from 2007 to 2012, an important factor in patient outcomes as well as in monetary savings, according to findings of a study yesterday in Pediatrics.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said yesterday that it has requested US researchers to conduct a "safety stand-down" to assess stocks of potentially dangerous pathogens and outlined longer-term steps to ensure lab biosecurity.
Two Palm Beach County, Fla., residents have acquired chikungunya locally, bringing the nation's total number of locally acquired cases to six, the Palm Beach Post reported yesterday.
State and county health officials said that a 43-year-old man and 35-year-old woman contracted the painful mosquito-borne disease without traveling to outbreak areas.
The neuraminidase inhibitor laninamivir, made by Biota Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Alpharetta, Ga., failed to perform better than a placebo at alleviating influenza symptoms in a phase 2 trial, the company said in a press release today, adding that it will no longer develop the drug.
New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not required to hold public hearings on the safety of feeding antibiotics at subtherapeutic levels to food animals, a decision that advocates called a blow to public health, Food Safety News (FSN) reported today.
Overall funding for fiscal year 2014 will be $840 million — a $76 million cut.
The World Health Assembly (WHA) again did not decide on when the last laboratory stocks of variola virus, the pathogen that causes smallpox, should be destroyed, Nature reported today on its news blog.
In a moment that health officials have anticipated, the Florida Department of Health (FDH) today reported three cases of mosquito-borne chikungunya fever, all imported from the current 45,000-plus-case outbreak in the Caribbean.
The lab, completed in 2008 but held up over challenges, cleared two more obstacles yesterday.
