The Samoan government will temporarily close later this week to allow officials to focus on the country's growing measles outbreak, which has resulted in more than 3,700 cases and in 53 deaths since October, the Washington Post reported today.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said yesterday that 27 more people have been sickened in an Escherichia coli outbreak tied to romaine lettuce grown near Salinas, California.
The recent Lassa fever infections, one of them fatal, of two Dutch citizens working in Sierra Leone, along with related high-risk exposures in three United Kingdom citizens, are part of a healthcare Lassa cluster, according to new details about the event in the World Health Organization (WHO) African regional office's weekly outbreaks and emergencies update.
According to a small study today in Pediatrics, maternal antibodies to measles passed to infants in pregnancy dropped quickly after birth, with 92% of infants showing antibodies below the protective threshold by 3 months. By 6 months of age, all the infants were unprotected against measles, based on their antibody levels.
UNICEF said today that it is helping Samoa's government respond to a measles outbreak that has grown to more than 1,000 suspected cases, with 14 deaths in children younger than 5 years old and 1 in an adult.
Unvaccinated people may be 3 to 4 times more infectious than those with measles who were vaccinated.
In an update today, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health (MOH) reported one new MERS-CoV case, in a man from Riyadh. The case is Saudi Arabia's eighth this month.
In updates yesterday and today, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Health (MOH) reported two more MERS-CoV cases, one of them fatal and both from Riyadh.
One of the patients is a 33-year-old man whose contact with camels isn't known. He is not a health worker, and his exposure is listed as primary, meaning he probably didn't contract MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) from another patient.
After going 2 days with no new cases, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today reported 7 new lab-confirmed cases and 1 additional probable infection, raising the overall outbreak total to 3,282, which includes 118 probable cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) online Ebola dashboard.
Health officials are still investigating 447 suspected Ebola cases.
Saudi Arabia yesterday reported another lab-confirmed MERS-CoV infection, the second so far for November.
