A measles outbreak in Ohio has reached 73 cases—the largest state outbreak since 1996—and has helped spur US cases to some of their highest levels in recent years, according to data from the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Plans for the US government's "Generation 3" automated system to test the air for dangerous pathogens in US cities under the BioWatch program have been canceled over concerns about its cost and effectiveness, it was revealed recently.
Encouraging results suggest that health departments may someday have an oral drug to help extinguish outbreaks.
Guinea has reported 10 more suspected or confirmed cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD), along with three more deaths. Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO), said today in a Twitter post that the developments push the country's overall outbreak total to 137 illnesses, 86 of them fatal.
In separate announcements today, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported two more Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) cases in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of them fatal, raising the global MERS count to 200 cases.
Wild birds in Iceland harbor avian influenza viruses (AIVs) of entirely American lineage, entirely Eurasian lineage, and mixes of the two, providing compelling evidence of the importance of the North Atlantic as a corridor of virus movement and mixing, according to a study yesterday in PLoS One.
An emerging tick-borne bacterium in Europe, Asia, and Africa poses a risk for immunocompromised patients, causing an illness that could be mistaken for an underlying disease, according to a study published yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
A measles outbreak that started at a Christian school in Chilliwack, British Columbia, has now spread to a college campus near Vancouver, according to reports from Fraser Valley Health, the area's public health department, and British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT).
A measles outbreak in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver has temporarily closed a school in eastern British Columbia after sickening nearly 100 students, and vaccine is being distributed to pharmacies and physicians' offices as the outbreak spreads from the school into the nearby communities, according to news sources this week.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) recently urged countries to strengthen surveillance and control of the New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase–producing (NDM) antibiotic resistance, based on continued spread and detection in several countries.
