US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, yesterday announced the second year of funding to states—totaling $30.9 million—to support the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).
Pregnant women and their babies are the focus because of a strongly suspected link to complications.
A pair of US biotechnology companies today announced the launch of what appears to be the first phase 1 clinical trial of a MERS-CoV vaccine, while the World Health Organization (WHO) provided more details on the MERS-CoV case reported in Thailand earlier this week.
Cases of tularemia in four US states have reached at least 104 for 2015, according to federal and state officials.
Avian influenza viruses with components similar to those in the 1918 pandemic flu virus still circulate in nature, and genetic engineering experiments suggest it would take only a few mutations to turn them into a human threat, according to a team of scientists led by Yoshiro Kawaoka, DVM, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin.
A study published this week in Pediatrics suggests that most Clostridium difficile infections in children are unrelated to hospitalization and that a majority of these community-associated cases involve children who recently received antibiotic treatment for unrelated conditions.
Another H7N9 case has been detected in China, the ninth such infection to be reported in Guangdong province, where several of the country’s recent infections have been found.
Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said in a statement that the patient is a 31-year-old man who lives in Shenzhen. He started having symptoms on Dec 30 and was hospitalized on Jan 3, where he is in stable condition.
The risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) after flu vaccination was much lower than the risk of GBS after flu infection, according to a study today in Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Canadian researchers used a self-controlled study design and data from universal healthcare systems in Ontario from 1993 through 2011. They determined exposures to flu vaccine and flu illness from physician billing claims.
