Health officials from China's Hunan province today said a 47-year-old woman who worked as a farmer in Shaoyang City has died from an H5N6 avian flu infection, Xinhua, China's state news agency, reported today. The woman's illness marks the 16th infection from H5N6, 10 of which were fatal.
Medimmune scientists have been investigating what's behind the decreased FluMist effectiveness that prompted US vaccine advisors to recommend against it this year, and today they reported that reduced fitness of H1N1 vaccine virus strains are the likely culprit.
A "real-world" analysis of flu vaccine effectiveness (VE) today in Eurosurveillance that included 2 million Stockholm County, Sweden, residents each season found low flu VE in general but surprisingly robust results in two of the four seasons in adults 65 years and older who had chronic conditions.
A new study in PLoS One suggests that companion animals may be a potential source of community-acquired Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) in humans.
Animal health officials in Ivory Coast reported a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza outbreak at a commercial chicken farm in Abidjan district, located in the southern part of the country, according to a report today from the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
Experts hope the lack of a nasal-spray vaccine doesn't dampen recent advances in kids.
This is the first change of the H1N1 strain since the pandemic virus became a seasonal flu strain.
Pertussis immunization with the acellular vaccine offers high protection during the first 3 years, but immunity tapers off significantly over the next 4 years, Canadian researchers reported today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ).
Yesterday the World Health Organization (WHO) described five recent cases of MERS-CoV in Saudi Arabia, providing more evidence of the risk that camel contact poses in transmitting the disease.
The highly pathogenic H5N2 avian flu virus strain that caused outbreaks in poultry flocks across the United States is better adapted to chickens than a precursor H5N2 virus and is highly adapted to wild ducks, according to a new study by US Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists published in Virology.
