With 112 new cases in the past 24 hours, Samoa's outbreak has grown to 4,693 cases.
Afghanistan has one new case of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1), and Angola recorded 16 new cases of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) according to the latest weekly report from the Global Polio Eradication Intuitive (GPEI).
Measles cases skyrocketed 167% from 2016 to 2018, and deaths climbed from 110,000 in 2017 to 140,000 last year.
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.
