News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization has issued an alert over outbreaks of severe respiratory illness, including atypical pneumonia, that it has been investigating since mid-February in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization's (WHO's) top official in the western Pacific said yesterday that SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) cases may return this winter but probably not in large numbers.

"I don't think a large outbreak is likely," Dr. Shigeru Omi, director of the WHO's Western Pacific Regional Office, said in a speech in Hong Kong. Omi was quoted in a WHO news release.

(CIDRAP News) – The next infectious disease to enter the United States might cross the border taped to a traveler's leg or tucked snugly under a tourist's hat.

Smuggling of wild animals has always posed hazards to human health, but the stakes may be getting higher today, given the role of animal hosts in lethal outbreaks such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and avian influenza.

(CIDRAP News) – The strain of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) that erupted from obscurity to kill 774 people worldwide has gone quiet, at least for now. Yet its lessons will keep benefiting people even if it never reappears.

(CIDRAP News) – Reports today said three rare palm civets that recently died in captivity in Vietnam were infected with an H5N1 avian influenza virus, adding another species to the list of those susceptible to the pathogen.

(CIDRAP News) – Tests have confirmed that a 16-year-old girl and a 20-year-old woman who died in Indonesia last week had avian influenza, raising Indonesia's case tally to 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

The announcement follows China's report yesterday of its first two confirmed human cases of H5N1 avian flu on the mainland. The WHO has registered a total of 130 cases, including 67 deaths, since December 2003.

(CIDRAP News) – A 24-year-old Beijing man died of H5N1 avian influenza in November 2003, nearly two years before China reported any human H5N1 cases to the World Health Organization (WHO), according to Chinese scientists writing in today's New England Journal of Medicine.

The letter has renewed speculation about how many H5N1 cases might have been missed or not reported in China, especially before late 2005, according to news services.

(CIDRAP News) – The Chinese Ministry of Health is conducting its own investigation into the report of a man who died of H5N1 avian influenza in late 2003, according to a report today by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The case was first described by eight Chinese researchers in the Jun 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

(CIDRAP News) – The global death toll from H5N1 avian influenza grew by two today when the World Health Organization (WHO) added a Chinese case dating back to 2003 and the Indonesian case reported yesterday involving a 16-year-old boy. Meanwhile, reports today say another H5N1 death has occurred in Indonesia, this one in a teen girl.

(CIDRAP News) – Orlando, FL – Julie Gerberding, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), today challenged health and business leaders to stay focused on the "marathon" of preparing for an influenza pandemic.

Gerberding, speaking at a conference on business preparedness, said it's not possible to maintain high public interest in the pandemic threat indefinitely, but leaders must keep preparing anyway.