Both the H3N2 and B strains will differ in next year's Southern Hemisphere trivalent flu vaccine.
Bipartisan leaders of the US House oversight and investigations subcommittee yesterday continued to press federal health officials for answers about seasonal flu preparedness in the wake of a mismatch between the vaccine and the main circulating strain last season.
BARDA's director says he's hopeful that a call for proposals in October will bear better fruit.
Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) has sickened four more people in Saudi Arabia in the past 2 days, one of them fatally, according to reports from the country's Ministry of Health (MOH).
Grants to support emergency preparedness for local public health agencies and hospitals equal about $840 million.
State officials in Minnesota and Iowa today announced one new avian influenza outbreak apiece, both of them on turkey farms.
Minnesota's Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced that one more turkey flock is "presumptive positive" for avian flu. The outbreak occurred in Renville County, located in the south-central part of the state. The DPS said details on the outbreak's flock size will be released soon.
China's Jiangxi province on May 1 announced a new H7N9 avian influenza case, involving a 39-year old woman from Jiujiang who is hospitalized in critical condition, according to a provincial health department statement translated and posted by FluTrackers, an infectious disease news message board.
Avian flu has struck domestic birds in Niger, Taiwan, and South Africa, according to separate reports posted yesterday by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
School closures in Michigan during the fall wave of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic had little impact on disease spread, according to a retrospective study by a team based at the University of Michigan. The group published its findings yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
The number of US measles cases since Jan 1 has reached at least 154, an increase of 13 in the past week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its weekly update, and 118 of those cases are linked to Disneyland in California.
