The experts also called for 3 new pandemic candidate vaccine viruses.
Tests on 10 people on a flight from Dubai to New York City who were hospitalized afterward showed no illnesses except for flu and common cold viruses, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC Health) announced today, adding that it expects all 10 people to be released soon.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC's) ministry of health confirmed that the new Ebola outbreak in the eastern reaches of the country is caused by the Zaire Ebola virus species, according to Science magazine.
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) yesterday announced that a baby from San Bernardino County has died from pertussis, marking the state's first death from the disease since 2016.
A new analysis of a decade's worth of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus genetic sequences collected from poultry and wild birds in Egypt found 39 distinct substitutions with the possible ability to increase the pandemic potential of the virus, with spatial clustering that focused on two governorates—Alexandria and Beheira—that are located in the northwestern Nile Delta.
Spending public health money on surveillance rather than on broad, expensive genomic surveys of animal diseases is a sounder investment and better way to prepare for the next pandemic or other global health emergency, three infectious disease experts wrote today in Nature.
Health officials in Minnesota and Wisconsin are investigating a Salmonella outbreak linked to frozen breaded chicken products, and Canadian authorities are probing a similar outbreak also linked to the same type of product.
In an update to its Influenza Risk Assessment Tool (IRAT), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday added 2 more viruses, raising the total on the list to 15.
The Democratic Republic of Congo's health ministry yesterday and today ruled out some suspected cases based on lab tests and confirmed 2 more in the remote Iboko outbreak location, dropping the outbreak total to 50 cases, including 37 confirmed and 13 probable, with no suspected cases. No new deaths were reported, keeping that total at 25.
In a major development today on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly under way in Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank Group announced the launch of a new mechanism to firm up global health security, an independent monitoring board to regularly assess country preparedness to handle outbreaks, pandemics, and other health emergencies.