Ohio last week reported a case of variant H3N2 (H3N2v) influenza in a person who had had close contact with pigs, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Aug 22, marking what appears to be the first such US case this summer.
The infected person was hospitalized but has recovered completely, the CDC said in its weekly FluView surveillance report.
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.
Researchers who sifted data from 12 recent influenza seasons in Finland concluded that about 42% of influenza B cases involved strains that were not targeted by the vaccine, which they say supports the inclusion of both influenza B lineages in seasonal flu vaccines.
The number of newly reported chikungunya cases in the Caribbean region was down dramatically last week, but it's not clear if the drop was related to delays in reporting or a downturn in disease transmission. According to an Aug 15 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the region reported 9,798 new cases, accounting for an increase of only 1.7%.
A chikungunya candidate vaccine developed using noninfectious virus-like particles (VLPs) has been shown to provide long-term protection against multiple genotypes of the disease, according to results of the first human trial, conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and published today in The Lancet.
The number of travel-related US chikungunya cases has grown to 580, an increase of 96 in the past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its weekly update. The number of locally acquired cases stayed at 4, for 584 total US cases.
Officials reported more than 62,000 new chikungunya cases in the Caribbean and surrounding areas last week—almost all in the Dominican Republic—expanding the outbreak to 576,000 cases, according to an Aug 8 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
This year's tally of US chikungunya cases related to foreign travel, mostly to the Caribbean, has risen to 484, an increase of 86 over the past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.
Forty states have reported cases, three more than a week ago, the agency said in an Aug 5 update. The number of locally acquired cases stayed at four, all of them in Florida.
About two thirds of the 38,000 new cases reported last week were in the Dominican Republic.
Resistance to artemisinin, the main drug for treating malaria, has now spread throughout Southeast Asia, including critical border regions, and a genetic mutation in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease may be the culprit, according to a study today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
