TFAH says many states have a mediocre level of infectious-disease preparedness.
A newly released guide developed by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the World Health Organization (WHO) aims to strengthen the capacity worldwide for collaboration and coordination between national public health and national animal health authorities.
Austria has reported its first MERS case, involving a visiting Saudi Arabian woman, while her home country has reported yet another case.
The Austrian health ministry said yesterday that the Saudi woman arrived in the country a few days ago and is now isolated in a Vienna hospital in critical condition, according to a Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA) story today.
An analysis of 4 years of records from 505 US hospitals suggests that duplicative use of antibiotics is pervasive, leading to needless costs and potentially increasing resistance to the drugs, says a report yesterday in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (ICHE).
In a study designed to simulate how the pandemic 2009 influenza (pH1N1) virus might have evolved, researchers say it took only nine passages in pigs for a virus to gain "greatly enhanced virulence and transmissibility" in pigs, guinea pigs, and ferrets.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said this week that the safety of gain-of-function (GOF) studies like a recent one involving the generation of a 1918-like influenza virus merits more public discussion, given the obligation of researchers to "first do no harm."
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) director, Thomas Frieden, MD, MPH, has been asked by three top Republicans on the US House Energy Committee for several types of information on the recent breach of safety protocols resulting in possible exposure of lab personnel to Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, according to Reuters today.
Saudi Arabia reported a new MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) case today, in a 55-year-old Saudi national from the city of Wadi Aldwasir, located in the south central part of the country, according to a statement today from the Ministry of Health (MOH).
The woman isn't a healthcare worker and has symptoms, the MOH said. She has an underlying illness and is hospitalized in an intensive care unit.
The flu vaccine in three European nations in 2012-13 provided 33% protection against hospitalization for influenza in adults, according to a study yesterday in PLoS One.
Syria's eighth vaccination campaign in as many months begins this week and hopes to reach 2.8 million children over 5 days, according to a news release yesterday from the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean.
