The new case involves a 17-year-old boy whose illness wasn't detected until he died, which is bad news for outbreak containment.
The first field trial of a rapid, point-of-care test for Ebola infection found that it was as accurate as conventional lab methods, which in outbreak settings can take days to get a result. A research team from Harvard Medical School, Partners in Health (PIH), and Boston Children's Hospital published its findings yesterday in The Lancet.
Guinea and Sierra Leone report 20 new cases, and 3 health workers are infected.
South Korea's health ministry reported four more MERS-CoV infections today, boosting the total to 179, and said they have identified transmission that may have occurred outside of the hospital setting, according to media reports.
A US Army facility in Utah that mistakenly shipped live Bacillus anthracis to dozens of other labs over a 10-year period did not properly test its method for killing the bacterium, which causes anthrax, according to a USA Today story based on a government report.
A new genetic study of Ebola viruses in West Africa's epidemic, published yesterday in Nature, helps trace the disease's spread and, according to the authors, shows that the virus mutated at about the same rate observed in earlier outbreaks.
As cases drop slightly, vaccine trials suffer from lack of patients. Also, the NIH announces a trial involving survivors.
Saudi Arabia reports 4 new MERS cases, 3 in HofufSaudi Arabia's Minister of Health (MOH) reported four more MERS-CoV cases over the weekend and today—three in the hot spot city of Hofuf—in an outbreak that still simmers even as it gets overshadowed by MERS events in South Korea. The agency also reported three deaths in previously reported cases.
To prepare the nation better for cases of Ebola or other serious diseases, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) has earmarked about $20 million to develop nine regional treatment centers across the country, HHS said today in a news release.
Two high-ranking members of Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to assess whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acted properly in scrapping a multimillion-dollar contract for developing new technology for detecting bioterror agents, the Washington Post reported today.
