One in five deaths in children worldwide is caused by pneumonia, a preventable disease, but there are simple and effective ways to reduce its burden, says a joint statement from the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) issued today, the fifth World Pneumonia Day, themed "Innovate to End Child Pneumonia."
The first reported US multistate outbreak of campylobacteriosis linked to chicken livers, in 2012, involved raw or lightly cooked product and an infected worker at the implicated plant, according to a report today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
Closure of live-poultry markets (LPMs) in four Chinese cities in the spring of this year promptly cut H7N9 avian flu cases by more than 97%, according to a statistical analysis published today in The Lancet.
US researchers reported yesterday that giving mice a flu vaccine and simultaneously treating them with rapamycin, an immune-suppressing drug, caused them to generate antibodies that were protective against other flu strains, including H5N1 and H7N9.
A German research team that analyzed and compared H7N9 influenza virus from a diseased human and H7 viruses from birds found that the human strain replicated as well as seasonal flu in lab culture designed to mimic human lung tissue, but the avian H7 strain grew poorly. They reported their findings yesterday in the latest edition of mBio.
The rate of hospitalizations for coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever, in California doubled from 2000 to 2011, and close to 16,000 patients needed hospital care for the fungal disease during that span, according to a report today by California public health officials.
Scientists who conducted the first large-scale cholera outbreak control campaign in Africa using oral vaccine reported yesterday in PLoS One that immunization was well accepted by the public and that high vaccination coverage is possible, even in remote settings.
Researchers found clear evidence that an intense immune response played a role in the demise of some pandemic H1N1 victims.
One more variant H3N2 (H3N2v) has been reported to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), edging the total so far this year to 16, according to an update today. The newly reported infection is in a patient from Indiana, which has reported all but two of the H3N2v cases reported this year.
An Egyptian surveillance study found that while H5N1 avian flu viruses were uncommon on commercial poultry farms, more than 10% of backyard and live-market birds harbored the virus, according to a report in the Journal of Virology.
