In its weekly update yesterday the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said 36 more suspected acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) cases are under investigation, raising the national total since the first of the year to 191.
The data suggest that, for the vast majority of men, Zika RNA is cleared from semen within 4 months.
US Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials have confirmed a second outbreak of low-pathogenic H7N3 avian flu in a California turkey flock in the same county—Stanislaus—as one reported a week ago, according to a World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) report yesterday.
Kuwait's health ministry said yesterday that an investigation so far hasn't turned up any evidence to suggest that a South Korean business traveler who was diagnosed with MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) after returning to his home country was exposed in Kuwait, the Korea Times reported today.
Clinical follow-up of 141 babies born with congenital Zika virus problems who were evaluated at a referral center in Brazil revealed that 67% experienced epilepsy, a prevalence that was higher than the 9% to 50% reported in earlier studies. Researchers from Brazil described their findings today in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced a case of atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow" disease) in a 6-year-old beef cow in Florida.
In another new development, the NIH today announced the start of the first human trial of a live attenuated vaccine against Zika.
Also, the CDC says to wait 3 months before trying to conceive rather than 6 after possible Zika exposure.
Yesterday Emergent BioSolutions announced the start of a phase 1 clinical trial for ZIKV-IG, the company's anti-Zika virus immune globulin. The double-blind, randomized, and placebo-controlled clinical study will enroll about 30 healthy volunteers at a single site.
Norovirus and Salmonella cause the most outbreaks and illnesses in food outbreaks in the United States, but Listeria, Salmonella, and Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli (STEC) lead to the most serious illnesses and deaths, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists reporting in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
