States reported another bump in Cyclospora cases last week, and health officials are still trying to determine how many are travel-related and if there is a common source for the locally acquired cases. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that as of Aug 12 it had been notified of 283 Cyclospora infections, 48 more than the previous week.
Officials reported more than 62,000 new chikungunya cases in the Caribbean and surrounding areas last week—almost all in the Dominican Republic—expanding the outbreak to 576,000 cases, according to an Aug 8 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has turned down a long-pending petition to declare antibiotic-resistant (ABR) Salmonella an adulterant in raw ground meat and poultry, saying there's not enough evidence to support the change.
The agency also establishes new steps to control Salmonella and Campylobacter in poultry.
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.
