Recent News

By Region: North America

H1N1 discovery paves way for universal flu vaccine: UBC research

(EurekAlert!) University of British Columbia researchers have found a potential way to develop universal flu vaccines and eliminate the need for seasonal flu vaccinations. Each year, seasonal influenza causes serious illnesses in three to five million people and 200,000 to 500,000 deaths. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic killed more than 14,000 people worldwide. Meanwhile, public health Read More »

May 8, 2012
| Filed under North America, Countermeasures, Public Health, and Research
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Atypical BSE Has Never Led To Human vCJD – But Could It?

(Food Safety News) There is good news and bad news about the “L-type” atypical mad cow phenotype, found in the nearly 11-year-old, dead dairy cow discovered two weeks ago in California. The good news is no human has ever contracted variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD) disease from cattle infected with atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

May 8, 2012
| Filed under Asia/Pacific, Europe, North America, Agents & Toxins, Agriculture, and Public Health
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Bird flu papers cause controversy

(The Telegram) Four months ago the U.S. government sought to block publication of two studies about how scientists created an easily spread form of bird flu. Now a revised version of one paper is seeing the light of day with the government’s blessing. The revision appears online in the journal Nature. It’s the near-conclusion to Read More »

May 8, 2012
| Filed under Europe, North America, International, Policy & Initiatives, and Research
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How the World Health Organization is Helping to Prevent a Catastrophic H5N1 …

(World Health Organization HQ, Geneva) H5N1 influenza is what keeps people here up at night. The flu strain is deadly to humans on an order of magnitude greater than any other flu virus in history, including the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. It kills approximately 60% of the people it infects. Just to put that Read More »

May 8, 2012
| Filed under Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North America, South America, South Asia, International, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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Twin Cities medicine-by-mail test called successful

(CIDRAP News) Without any major hitches, mail carriers delivered empty pill bottles and fliers to about 37,000 Twin Cities area homes yesterday to rehearse part of the planned response to an anthrax attack or widespread disease outbreak, according to officials involved in the exercise. Mail trucks hit the streets at 6 o’clock in the morning, Read More »