Saudi Arabia today confirmed one new MERS-CoV case, in a 60-year-old foreign health worker whose illness was detected in the city of Jubail, in the northeastern part of the country, according to a statement from the Ministry of Health (MOH).
The man is hospitalized in an intensive care unit, according to the report. He had no pre-existing disease, the MOH said.
A search of government labs in the wake of a July discovery of old vials of smallpox virus has turned up additional improperly stored pathogens that cause plague, tularemia, melioidosis, botulism, and a certain foodborne disease, as well as the toxin ricin, the Washington Post reported today.
China has confirmed a fatal H7N9 avian flu case in a 66-year-old woman, Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said today.
The woman is from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the country's far northwest. The only other reported H7N9 case in the region, in a 53-year-old man, was confirmed last week. All other mainland H7N9 cases have been in eastern provinces, hundreds of miles away.
With 69,343 new cases, mostly from the Dominican Republic, the chikungunya outbreak in the Caribbean reached 658,466 cases last week, according to an Aug 29 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
Twenty-six patients spread the virus to 12 contacts total, only 1 of whom got sick.
Saudi Arabia reported another MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) case today, the second in 2 days, following a 13-day spell without any cases.
The new case involves a 52-year-old Saudi woman in Dammam, the same location as the case reported yesterday in a 60-year-old man. The new patient, who is not a healthcare worker, is hospitalized and has a preexisting disease, the Saudi Ministry of Health (MOH) said.
Ohio last week reported a case of variant H3N2 (H3N2v) influenza in a person who had had close contact with pigs, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Aug 22, marking what appears to be the first such US case this summer.
The infected person was hospitalized but has recovered completely, the CDC said in its weekly FluView surveillance report.
It's time to reassess strategies for controlling methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in hospitals, mainly because of poor evidence for the efficacy of screening and isolation, which have been regarded as the gold-standard approach, say three German and Swiss experts writing in The Lancet.
In a study designed to simulate how the pandemic 2009 influenza (pH1N1) virus might have evolved, researchers say it took only nine passages in pigs for a virus to gain "greatly enhanced virulence and transmissibility" in pigs, guinea pigs, and ferrets.
The number of newly reported chikungunya cases in the Caribbean region was down dramatically last week, but it's not clear if the drop was related to delays in reporting or a downturn in disease transmission. According to an Aug 15 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the region reported 9,798 new cases, accounting for an increase of only 1.7%.
