South Korea today reported its first confirmed MERS-CoV case in 5 days, in a nurse who works at Samsung Medical Center, the hardest-hit facility in the country's large healthcare-linked outbreak. The latest illness raises the total to 183.
Today the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the launch of a national center to help healthcare providers and facilities prepare for, transport, and treat patients with Ebola and other emerging disease threats, the agency said in a news release.
Officials are puzzling over how the boy who died contracted the virus, as at least two more cases surface.
The new case involves a 17-year-old boy whose illness wasn't detected until he died, which is bad news for outbreak containment.
The first field trial of a rapid, point-of-care test for Ebola infection found that it was as accurate as conventional lab methods, which in outbreak settings can take days to get a result. A research team from Harvard Medical School, Partners in Health (PIH), and Boston Children's Hospital published its findings yesterday in The Lancet.
Guinea and Sierra Leone report 20 new cases, and 3 health workers are infected.
South Korea's health ministry reported four more MERS-CoV infections today, boosting the total to 179, and said they have identified transmission that may have occurred outside of the hospital setting, according to media reports.
A US Army facility in Utah that mistakenly shipped live Bacillus anthracis to dozens of other labs over a 10-year period did not properly test its method for killing the bacterium, which causes anthrax, according to a USA Today story based on a government report.
A new genetic study of Ebola viruses in West Africa's epidemic, published yesterday in Nature, helps trace the disease's spread and, according to the authors, shows that the virus mutated at about the same rate observed in earlier outbreaks.
As cases drop slightly, vaccine trials suffer from lack of patients. Also, the NIH announces a trial involving survivors.
