News & Perspective

(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) – The revelation that samples of the influenza virus that caused the flu pandemic of 1957-58 were inadvertently sent to thousands of laboratories has raised fears of a new pandemic and triggered an urgent effort to destroy the samples.

(CIDRAP News) – The death toll in Angola's outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever has climbed to 244 of 266 people infected, but Angolan officials say the epidemic has been confined to the province where it began, according to news reports today.

(CIDRAP News) – An international group of experts that will advise the World Health Organization (WHO) on avian and pandemic influenza issues met for the first time yesterday in Geneva, Switzerland.

(CIDRAP News) – A disease outbreak involving Ebola hemorrhagic fever and other illnesses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is continuing to grow and may be spreading beyond the area first affected, according to the latest reports.

(CIDRAP News) – Five years after the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic spread around the globe via air travel, significant barriers still stand in the way of tracking down and notifying airline passengers who may have been exposed to an infectious disease.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization's (WHO's) top influenza expert said today it's too soon to judge whether the H1N1 influenza pandemic has passed its peak, though he acknowledged that cases are dropping in the United States and Canada.