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."
As the United States celebrated Independence Day late last week, federal officials announced that Foster Farms has recalled chicken products implicated in a Salmonella outbreak that has now reached 621 cases in 29 states.
Multidrug-resistant Salmonella has decreased and resistance to two important classes of antibiotics remains low, but resistance to the bacterium that causes typhoid fever is worrisome.
California has logged 1,100 new cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in the past 2 weeks, bringing its season total to 4,558, almost twice as many as in all of 2013, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) said today in a news release.
The detection this week of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) from Equatorial Guinea in Brazilian sewage and the virus's movement from Cameroon into Equatorial Guinea point up the high risk of international spread of the virus from the western portion of central Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.
Saudi Arabia reported one new MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) case today, raising the country's official total to 706 cases.
The latest patient is a 45-year-old expatriate who is hospitalized in Riyadh, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said in today's update. He has no preexisting conditions and is not a healthcare worker. The ministry gave no information about how he was exposed to the virus.
The World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday said it is working with local and international health partners in Iraq to address pressing concerns—including measles and polio risks—of populations hit hard by recent instability there.
Eighteen more illnesses, including five from a second subtype, have been reported in a multistate Salmonella outbreak linked to contact with pet bearded dragons, and four more states are reporting cases, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said yesterday in an update.
The new cases push the outbreak total to 150 and the number of affected states to 35.
Four more cases of Salmonella linked to sprouted chia powder have been added to the US count and five to Canada's, and a third strain of the organism has been implicated in the outbreak, according to updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
West Africa's Ebola virus outbreak continues to swell, with 20 new cases and 3 additional deaths, according to an update yesterday from the World Health Organization (WHO), based on new reports the agency received on Jun 2 and 3.
