One in five deaths in children worldwide is caused by pneumonia, a preventable disease, but there are simple and effective ways to reduce its burden, says a joint statement from the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) issued today, the fifth World Pneumonia Day, themed "Innovate to End Child Pneumonia."
Google Flu Trends has adjusted the modeling it uses so that it can more accurately predict US activity after it overemphasized flu severity last season, Google engineer Christian Stefansen said in a blog post yesterday.
China has reported its second case of H7N9 avian flu in a week, according to a story today from Xinhua, China's state news agency.
The Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed the virus in a 67-year-old Zhejiang man. Last week a 35-year-old man from the same province was confirmed to have the disease.
An 8-year-old girl in Cambodia has become the country's 21st H5N1 avian flu case-patient this year, according to a detailed statement today from Cambodia's Ministry of Health (MoH) and the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Western Pacific Region.
Neither the seasonal trivalent (three-strain) influenza vaccine (TIV) nor a monovalent H3N2 vaccine substantially reduced shedding of variant H3N2 (H3N2v) virus in ferrets, but previous infection with a seasonal H3N2 virus did, according to a study yesterday in the Journal of Virology.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and other health groups yesterday launched what they billed as the first global action plan to stop tuberculosis (TB) in children, saying it could save as many as 74,000 lives each year.
New federal contracts establish a "fill and finish" network for flu vaccine to boost capacity by 20%.
The World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday recommended a specific H7N9 influenza strain for vaccine development, saying it "elicits antibodies that react well with all viruses tested."
In a statement, the WHO said it has selected an A/Anhui/1/2013-like virus for the development of H7N9 vaccines for pandemic preparedness. It notes that A/Shanghai/2/2013 is an A/Anhui/1/2013-like virus.
Clinical trials will test a candidate vaccine for H7N9 flu in varying doses, some with immune boosters.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today announced two emergency regional projects aimed at detecting and containing H7N9 avian flu in Southeast Asia, the agency said in a press release.
