The World Health Assembly (WHA) again did not decide on when the last laboratory stocks of variola virus, the pathogen that causes smallpox, should be destroyed, Nature reported today on its news blog.
Scientists with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have detected a new orthopoxvirus—the family of viruses that includes smallpox and cowpox—in three people in the nation of Georgia, including two herdsmen, the CDC reported in a news release yesterday.
Saudi Arabian officials today reported four Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) cases in Riyadh, one of them fatal and the other three severe enough to require intensive care.
Seven of the 26 exposed workers had been vaccinated against smallpox, and only 1 of them got infected.
Flu activity gained a bit more momentum last week but is still low overall, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its weekly update. The percentage of respiratory specimens testing positive for flu rose again, to 5.4%, and for the first time one of CDC's regions—the one including south-central states such as Louisiana and Arkansas—saw clinic visits for flu-like illness rise above its specific baseline.
A study on aerosol transmission of the novel H7N9 virus in ferrets found evidence of limited spread at levels more robust than avian influenza viruses, but less than seasonal flu and the 2009 H1N1 virus, researchers reported yesterday.
The group, from Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, published its findings in Nature.
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