Two people have died and three hospitalised after developing a “pneumonia of unknown origin”, Argentinian health authorities have announced.
According to the Ministry of Health in Tucumán – a small region in the northwest of the country some 800 miles from the capital, Buenos Aires – six people in the same intensive care unit have contracted mystery pneumonia.
The World Health Organization has added the U.S. to its list of countries with circulating polio. It joins the likes of Somalia, Yemen, and Israel
September 13, 2022 at 9:46 PM GMT+1
The U.S. has been added to the World Health Organization’s list of countries with circulating polio, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday.
It now joins roughly 30 other countries with outbreaks, including Algeria, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Yemen, Israel, and the U.K.
“We cannot emphasize enough that polio is a dangerous disease for which there is no cure,” Dr. José R. Romero, director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a statement, urging anyone who is unvaccinated to get vaccinated.
In July of this year, an unvaccinated 20-year-old man in New York’s Rockland County was diagnosed with polio and paralyzed by the virus. Since then, polio has been identified in wastewater samples in neighboring counties.
Genetic sequencing has connected the paralyzed man’s case and wastewater specimens from New York to wastewater samples in Jerusalem, Israel, and London, indicating community transmission, according to the CDC.
Uganda confirms 7 Ebola cases, races to halt outbreak
Source: AP News
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Uganda confirmed seven Ebola infections Thursday as authorities try to track down 43 contacts of known Ebola patients two days after authorities in the East African country announced an outbreak of the contagious disease.
A total of eight deaths, including one confirmed, are “attributable to the virus,” said Dr. Henry Kyobe, a Ugandan military officer who is tracking Ebola cases. He spoke of a “rapidly evolving” situation where “we think cases may rise in a few days.”
The epicenter of the outbreak is the central Ugandan district of Mubende, whose main town lies along a highway into the capital, Kampala. That travel link and several crowded artisanal gold mines there is concerning, Kyobe told the World Health Organization.
Ugandan authorities have not yet to found the source of the outbreak, and neither have they discovered the key first case. But they were able to confirm an Ebola outbreak of the Sudan type earlier this week after testing a sample from a 24-year-old man who had been initially treated for other illnesses, including malaria and pneumonia, when he sought care in his home town. Six others in the same area, including three children, died earlier in September after suffering what local officials called a strange illness.
There is no proven vaccine for the Sudan strain of Ebola, and “its very critical at this point that we treat this outbreak as serious, because we may not have the advantage that we have gained in terms of the advancement in medical countermeasures,” said Dr. Patrick Otim, an epidemiologist with WHO in Africa.
Team Links Malaria Spike with Mass Amphibian Die-Off by Kat Kerlin
September 23, 2022
Introduction:
(Futurity) Researchers have linked an amphibian die-off in Costa Rica and Panama with a spike in malaria cases in the region.
At the spike’s peak, up to 1 person per 1,000 annually contracted malaria that normally would not have had the amphibian die-off not occurred, researchers report.
Dozens of species of frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians quietly disappeared from parts of Latin America in the 1980s and 2000s, with little notice from humans, outside of a small group of ecologists.
Yet the new study shows the amphibian decline had direct health consequences for people.
“Stable ecosystems underpin all sorts of aspects of human well-being, including regulating processes important for disease prevention and health,” says lead author Michael Springborn, a professor in the environmental science and policy department at the University of California, Davis. “If we allow massive ecosystem disruptions to happen, it can substantially impact human health in ways that are difficult to predict ahead of time and hard to control once they’re underway.”
New Coronavirus That Could Infect Humans Discovered Lurking In Russian Bats by Tom Hale
September 23, 2022
Introduction:
(IFL Science) Scientists have revealed that a recently discovered coronavirus found in Russian bats has the worrying ability to infect human cells. Although the pathogen is very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, our current vaccines would be useless against it.
Khosta-1 and Khosta-2 viruses were discovered living in horseshoe bats near Sochi National Park back in 2020. The novel viruses were revealed to be sarbecoviruses, the same band of coronaviruses responsible for the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, as well as COVID-19.
In a new study, scientists from Washington State University have taken another look at “these weird Russian viruses” and discovered they are likely to be more dangerous than first hoped.
"Genetically, these weird Russian viruses looked like some of the others that had been discovered elsewhere around the world, but because they did not look like SARS-CoV-2, no one thought they were really anything to get too excited about," Michael Letko, corresponding study author and virologist at Washington State University, said in a statement.
"But when we looked at them more, we were really surprised to find they could infect human cells. That changes a little bit of our understanding of these viruses, where they come from and what regions are concerning," he said.
Cheese recall begins after listeria outbreak infects 6 people
Source: Axios
Six people have been infected by a Listeria outbreak across six different states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The big picture: Five of the infected people have been hospitalized, but there have been no deaths. State and local officials are still conducting interviews about what the infected people ate before they got sick.
Driving the news: Six people in New Jersey, California, Texas, Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts were infected by the outbreak as of Friday.
Five of the infected people have been hospitalized.
Haiti reports cholera deaths for first time in 3 years
Source: AP
By EVENS SANON
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s government on Sunday announced that at least eight people have died from cholera, raising concerns about a potentially fast-spreading scenario and reviving memories of an epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 people a decade ago.
The cases - the first cholera deaths reported in three years - came in a community called Dekayet in southern Port-au-Prince and in the gang-controlled seaside slum of Cite de Soleil, where thousands of people live in cramped, unsanitary conditions.
“Cholera is something that can spread very, very quickly,” warned Laure Adrien, director general of Haiti’s health ministry.
Food or water contaminated with the cholera bacteria can lead to severe diarrhea and dehydration that can be deadly.