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.
New DNA evidence has shown that Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plaque, has been endemic in humans for at least 3,000 years before the first plague pandemic was recorded, according to findings yesterday in Cell.
The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is falling short in its mission in several ways, such as lack of timely information to its partners, poor partner participation, and difficulty prioritizing some activities, and might even need to be discontinued, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report yesterday.
President Barack Obama today nominated deputy commissioner Robert Califf, MD, as the next Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, Bloomberg News reported. If approved by the Senate, Califf would replace Margaret Hamburg, MD, who stepped down in March after serving 6 years.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today finalized the first two of seven major rules for implementing the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)—those covering prevention steps for both human and animal food.
