A review and meta-analysis of studies on bacterial transmission and antibiotic resistance during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca has found rising rates of resistance among certain gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, researchers report in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease.
President Donald Trump announced yesterday that Francis Collins, MD, PhD, an Obama administration holdover, will stay on as permanent director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), multiple media sites reported.
In an epidemiologic update on MERS-CoV in Saudi Arabia today, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted that there were more cases in the first 2 months of 2017 than during the same period last year. The WHO also said its scientists are seeing younger women with the coronavirus, but that much of the disease's demographics haven't changed.
Portugal yesterday reported its first highly pathogenic H5N8 avian influenza detection, in a grey heron found dead near the southern city of Faro, according to a notice yesterday from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In several countries in Europe and other regions that have had H5N8 outbreaks, the virus was first found in wild birds before jumping to poultry.
President-elect Donald Trump has named Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an outspoken critic of vaccines, chair of a panel on vaccine safety and scientific integrity, according to the Washington Post today. Trump met with Kennedy at Trump Towers in New York today.
SAB Biotherapeutics, Inc., of Sioux Falls, S.D., announced today that its experimental human antibody treatment for MERS-CoV—called SAB-301—has entered human trials, the first potential treatment for the disease to do so.
Yellow fever in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been declared an epidemic in three provinces as officials report 1,000 suspected cases, Reuters reported today.
Today the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Liberia free of Ebola transmission—meaning the last patient in the country tested negative for a second time 42 days ago—a step that marks the third time West Africa has been declared free of Ebola after its massive outbreak in 2014 and 2015.
Pet dogs and cats can be colonized with the MCR-1 antibiotic-resistance gene and pass it to people, Chinese researchers reported yesterday in a letter to Emerging Infectious Diseases. Their findings came from an investigation into MCR-1–harboring Escherichia coli isolates from three men hospitalized in a Guangzhou facility's urology ward toward the end of 2015.
Hawaii health officials have confirmed two locally acquired dengue infections and are investigating four probable cases, all on the state's big island of Hawaii.
Further testing is under way at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Hawaii State Department of Health (HSDOH) has sent an alert to clinicians yesterday to report suspected cases, the agency said in a press release.
