The Obama administration announced today that it is suspending funding of "gain-of-function" (GOF) studies on influenza and other viruses to allow time to assess the risks and benefits of such controversial research and develop a federal policy on it.
Another 34 patients have tested positive for enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), raising the US total to 628 cases, and Florida has recorded its first confirmed case, according to today's update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Cases have now been confirmed in 44 states, the CDC reported. The only states with no confirmed cases are Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, Alaska, and Hawaii.
Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health (MOH) confirmed a new MERS-CoV infection today—the 10th since Sep 8—as well as the death of a recently reported case-patient.
The new case is in a 60-year-old Saudi from Riyadh who had unspecified preexisting disease. He is hospitalized in an intensive care unit (ICU) and is not a healthcare worker nor did he have any recent exposure to animals, the MOH said.
As PAHO stresses mosquito control and other steps, the US chikungunya total tops 900 cases.
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.
China has confirmed a fatal H7N9 avian flu case in a 66-year-old woman, Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said today.
The woman is from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the country's far northwest. The only other reported H7N9 case in the region, in a 53-year-old man, was confirmed last week. All other mainland H7N9 cases have been in eastern provinces, hundreds of miles away.
With 69,343 new cases, mostly from the Dominican Republic, the chikungunya outbreak in the Caribbean reached 658,466 cases last week, according to an Aug 29 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
The US government plans to request that federally funded laboratories suspend all work on potentially dangerous pathogens for about 24 hours to inventory stocks of microbes, ScienceInsider reported today.
In its ongoing response to safety lapses at two of its high-containment labs, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced the members of an external lab safety work group. The 11-person group will advise CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, and the CDC's new director of lab safety, Michael Bell, MD, according to a statement.
In the wake of finding smallpox vials in a storage area earlier this month and a congressional hearing today on federal lab biosecurity (see related story), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the earlier discovery also included more than 300 vials of pathogens such as influenza and dengue viruses, as
