An independent audit of MERS-CoV data in Saudi Arabia yesterday identified 16 more infections with illness onsets before Jun 3 and has reclassified a handful of previously reported cases, the country's Ministry of Health (MOH) announced yesterday.
It said the review is part of an ongoing effort to ensure that MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) data are accurate.
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.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) said yesterday that it has requested US researchers to conduct a "safety stand-down" to assess stocks of potentially dangerous pathogens and outlined longer-term steps to ensure lab biosecurity.
A US House of Representatives committee that will host a hearing on Jul 16 to question federal officials on recent incidents involving anthrax bacteria and other pathogens at US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) labs today unveiled some findings from its requests for documents and testimony about the agency's biosafety issues.
The IDSA stressed that many infections heal on their own or don't need antibiotics.
Novartis and Pfizer today announced that they have submitted applications to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for marketing approval of their vaccines against Neisseria meningitidis serogroup B infection.
An Austrian pharmaceutical company today reported promising findings from a phase 1 study of its candidate chikungunya vaccine. The vaccine, which uses a standard measles vaccine vector, induced a significant neutralizing immune response and appeared to be safe, according to a press release from the Vienna-based company, Themis Bioscience.
A recently published case report on the nation's first death from Heartland virus, in an 80-year-old man who had been reported as Tennessee's first case, sheds light on the clinical profile and hints that older people who have underlying complications may be more vulnerable to complications from the disease.
The Caribbean chikungunya outbreak grew by 4,521 cases in the past week, with the increase almost entirely attributed to new cases in the Dominican Republic. In fact, for the first time in months, most nations reported no new cases.
Officials at the Pasteur Institute in Paris say the laboratory's loss of 2,349 "tubes" containing fragments of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus does not pose an infection risk, but they call the lapse an "unacceptable mistake," according to media reports.
