The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday announced that, for now, it won't enforce four rules related to the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a law passed in 2011 that signaled the biggest overhaul in the nation's food safety laws in 70 years.
Federal and state health officials are investigating a multistate Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak that has sickened 17 people in 13 states, and preliminary tests by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that the outbreak strain is closely related to one in Canada that has been associated with romaine lettuce.
Only 19 states reported increasing or maintaining their public health budgets, down from 26 last year.
"Censorship . . . threatens to disrupt a prime goal of government: protecting public safety," the groups write.
England has experienced an unprecedented resurgence in scarlet fever infections that began in 2014, but so far the reasons for the escalation aren't clear, researchers from Public Health England reported yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
An analysis of 40 human H7N9 avian flu clusters from five waves of disease activity in China found a stable pattern in number and size, suggesting that the human-to-human transmission risk hasn't changed since the virus emerged in 2013. A team from China and their collaborators at the US Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention reported its findings yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health (MOH) reported a new case of MERS-CoV infection in Az Zulfi in the central part of the country near Riyadh.
Tests on a traditional healer in Kenya who was a contact of one of the lab-confirmed Uganda Marburg patients has tested negative, and other high-risk contacts in Kenya have completed their 21-day monitoring periods, with no other illnesses detected, the World Health Organization (WHO) said yesterday.
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health (MOH) reported two new cases of MERS-CoV infection today.
Madagascar's number of confirmed and suspected plague infections has climbed to 1,801, including 127 deaths, over the past few days, with the number of new cases from the pneumonic form of the disease continuing to decline, according to the latest situation report from the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa.
