Sad :-(


Yemen cholera epidemic: Cases exceed 500,000 in four months

The number of suspected cases of cholera resulting from an epidemic in war-torn Yemen has reached 500,000, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

At least 1,975 people have died since the waterborne disease began to spread rapidly at the end of April.

The WHO said the overall caseload had declined since July, but that 5,000 people a day were still being infected.

The disease spread due to deteriorating hygiene and sanitation conditions and disruptions to the water supply.

More than 14 million people are cut off from regular access to clean water and sanitation in Yemen, and waste collection has ceased in major cities.

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N.D. Department of Health confirms state’s first ever variant flu case

The Department of Health has confirmed the state's first ever case of variant flu in a human.

The confirmed case of the H3N2V influenza was found in a child who was exposed to pigs at the State Fair in July. That child was hospitalized, but recovered and has since been released.

Most cases of this variant influenza occur during summer months in people who had contact with pigs. Even though a child contracted the illness, experts say getting variant flu is highly unlikely.

“Human to human transmission of this strain happens extremely rarely and tends to happen when people are very close contact like a caregiver. And this is true of all novel influenzas,” said Jill Baber, who works with the Division of Disease Control.

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South Korea: 5 Sangmyung University students contract typhoid in India


Five students from Sangmyung University’s Cheonan Campus in South Chungcheong Province contracted typhoid while in India last month, according to the Korean Centers for Disease Control.

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Swine flu kills 1,094 in India in 8 months


NEW DELHI: The number of deaths caused by swine flu in the country has touched 1,094. Of them, 342 people have died due to the viral illness in the past three weeks.

The latest data on swine flu, released by the Union health ministry on Wednesday, reveals that Maharashtra and Gujarat are worst affected by the viral influenza with 437 and 269 deaths, respectively. States like Rajasthan, Kerala and Delhi have also reported a high incidence of the disease.


:-(((((

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Tesco revealed as supermarket which sold sausages that could have infected thousands with hepatitis E



Tesco has been named as the supermarket which sold pork that may have infected thousands with hepatitis E, a virus which can cause liver inflammation and failure.

Public Health England announced the contamination case earlier this week but only identified the supermarket that sold the sausages as 'Supermarket X'.

The organisation had studied the eating habits of 60 people infected with the virus and found that many ate sausage and ham from the same supermarket.

Public Health England and the Food Standards Agency originally decided not to name the store because it was not to blame for the tainted pork, which was imported from the EU.

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Deadliest outbreak of hepatitis A in decades kills 14 in San Diego


Fourteen people have died from an outbreak of hepatitis A in San Diego, and experts believe it to be the deadliest outbreak of the disease in the US in decades, the Guardian has learned.

In large part, the victims were homeless people who have had to contend with a lack of 24-hour public restrooms, even though hand-washing is one of the best defenses against infection.

The number of cases has exceeded other large outbreaks, said a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) spokesperson, and is “likely the most deaths in an outbreak in the US in the past 20 years”, the period in which the CDC has operated its electronic reporting system. In 2003, three people died and at least 124 were hospitalized after eating contaminated salsa at a Pennsylvania restaurant. In 2013, 69 people across 10 states were hospitalized after eating contaminated pomegranate seeds.

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Trader Joe's issues recall for 3,400 pounds of breakfast sausage

Trader Joe’s has issued a recall for more than 3,400 pounds of chicken breakfast sausage that is sold in 13 states over an undeclared soy ingredient. The product was produced and packaged Aug. 10-24, and contains soy lecithin, which is not included on the label.

The product, which has a skew number of 046618, is sold in Connecticut, D.C., Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Vermont. It contains five sausages and is sold in a 1-pound vacuum-sealed package, AZCentral.com reported.

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What Australia's bad flu season means for Europe, North America


Australia is having a worse flu season than usual this year, with 93,711 laboratory-confirmed cases reported to its National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System as of August 18, government data show.
That's almost 2½ times more infections than in the same period last year. According to a surveillance system report, adults over the age of 80 and children between 5 and 9 years old have been most affected.

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Strange case:


Italy orders investigation after rare child death from malaria


ROME -- Italy's health ministry has ordered an investigation into the death of a 4-year-old girl from malaria after checks determined she hadn't traveled to any country at risk for the disease.

The child died Monday at the Brescia public hospital after being transferred from Trento. Italy is not known to have the kind of mosquitoes that spread malaria.

The health ministry said Tuesday it is sending a team of experts to the Trento hospital to determine how the girl got infected, since she hadn't made any trips to countries with the parasitic disease.

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Whatever happened to the Zika virus?

If I asked if you'd heard of the Zika virus before 2015, chances are the answer would be no. In fact, many scientists working in the field of mosquito-transmitted diseases probably wouldn't have heard of it. If they had, it would have been regarded as something obscure from the history books.

First discovered in Uganda in the late 1940s, documented infections were rare until 2007 when the first large outbreak in humans occurred on the Pacific Island of Yap in Micronesia. The team of scientists involved in the initial discovery included the University of Glasgow's Professor Alexander John Haddow, and the university's archives hold 25 years of Haddow's data which is now being meticulously catalogued as part of project funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Further Zika virus outbreaks occurred during 2013-2014 on other Pacific islands – French Polynesia, Easter Island, the Cook Islands and New Caledonia – before it reached the Americas in 2015. What exactly led to this explosive outbreak is still not completely understood, but the virus suddenly became a very real health concern requiring urgent research.

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Rare Disease :(


Harvey first responder contracts flesh-eating bacteria infection

A Hurricane Harvey hero is recovering from multiple surgeries after he contracted a flesh-eating bacteria infection during rescue efforts. J.R. Atkins, a former medic and firefighter in Missouri City, Texas, hopped into a kayak last week and set off to check on neighbors after the Hurricane hit.

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:-(



Cholera Complicates Humanitarian Response In Nigeria's Northeast, UN Says


"2, 2017, 319 suspected cases and 20 deaths had been reported in the state", said the center.

Cholera is spreading fast through camps housing people displaced by Boko Haram militants in northeast Nigeria's Borno state, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Most of the suspected cases and deaths are in Muna Garage, a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Maiduguri, while other victims come from neighbouring districts, it said.

UNICEF Deputy Representative in Nigeria, Pernille Ironside said that, "Cholera is hard for young children to withstand at any time, but becomes a crisis for survival when their resilience is already weakened by malnutrition, malaria and other waterborne diseases".

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Puppies from pet store chain sicken 39 people, CDC says

(CNN)The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday it is investigating a multistate outbreak of campylobacter infections linked to contact with puppies sold through Petland, a national pet store chain.
Campylobacteriosis, a common bacterial infection, can cause diarrhea, abdominal pain and fever, according to the CDC.

As of September 11, a total of 39 people have fallen ill in seven states, including 11 cases in Florida, five in Kansas, one in Missouri, 18 in Ohio, two in Pennsylvania, one in Tennessee and one in Wisconsin. There have been nine hospitalizations and no deaths reported. The first case within this outbreak occurred on September 15, 2016.

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Cleaning Products May Increase Your Risk Of Chronic Lung Diseases Like Asthma, Study Shows

We know that cleanliness is important, but at what price? It’s bad enough that antibacterial soap is contributing to the growing drug-resistant bacteria dilemma, but now new research suggests that using too much bleach may increase the risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a serious and often deadly lung condition.

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Ebola RNA lingers in semen longer than expected

Ebola virus RNA can persist in the semen of survivors more than two years after the onset of infection, a new study finds.

Further, in some cases, researchers also detected Ebola virus RNA in the semen of men who had previously had a negative test.

The findings suggest that the 2016 World Health Organization guidelines relating to the sexual transmission of Ebola may need revision.

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235 sickened by salmonella outbreak linked to papayas


WASHINGTON – Salmonella outbreaks linked to Maradol papayas from Mexico have sickened 235 people in 26 states, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. Seventy-eight people have been hospitalized, and two people, one from New York and one from California, have died.

The majority of the salmonella cases have been documented in California, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Texas.

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WHO report paints dire picture of antibiotic development

A new report today from the World Health Organization (WHO) argues that the antibiotics currently in clinical development are not sufficient to counter rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR), particularly in the pathogens that present the greatest threat to human health.

The authors of the report, a group composed of physicians, microbiologists, and experts in antibiotic resistance and drug development, say that while the current pipeline of antibiotics and biological drugs could produce 10 new drugs over the next 5 years, these new treatments "will add little to the already existing arsenal and will not be sufficient to tackle the impending AMR threat."

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Broad swath of US deemed environmentally suitable for mosquitoes that transmit disease


Three-quarters of counties in the contiguous United States present suitable environmental conditions for at least part of the year for either Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus mosquitoes to survive if introduced, according to researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The two mosquito species can transmit viruses that cause Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever.

The new study, which analyzed existing county-level records of mosquito presence to model a more complete potential range, shows suitability for Ae. aegypti in 71 percent of counties, in a range that covers much of the eastern United States south of the Great Lakes, as well as parts of several southwestern states. The study deemed about 75 percent of counties suitable for Ae. albopictus, in a range that reaches further into the northeast but is more limited in the southwest. Predictive models generated the updated maps using mosquito records from individual counties published earlier this year. The maps are published in a new report in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

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Alarm as 'super malaria' spreads in South East Asia

The rapid spread of "super malaria" in South East Asia is an alarming global threat, scientists are warning.

This dangerous form of the malaria parasite cannot be killed with the main anti-malaria drugs.

It emerged in Cambodia but has since spread through parts of Thailand, Laos and has arrived in southern Vietnam.

The team at the Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok said there was a real danger of malaria becoming untreatable.

Prof Arjen Dondorp, the head of the unit, told the BBC News website: "We think it is a serious threat.

"It is alarming that this strain is spreading so quickly through the whole region and we fear it can spread further [and eventually] jump to Africa."

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STD Rates Continue to Skyrocket in the United States

New cases of the three most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the United States have hit a record high, according to this year's Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report , released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In 2016, there were just more than 2 million new diagnoses for the three notifiable STDs for which there are federally funded control programs. Chlamydia diagnoses made up the majority of those, with 1,598,354 new cases (497.3 cases per 100,000 population), which was a 4.7% increase over 2015. Gonorrhea diagnoses followed, with 468,514 diagnoses, and primary and secondary syphilis, the most infectious stages of the disease, at 27,814 cases.

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