Diseases & Outbreaks News and Discussions

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Time_Traveller
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Norovirus warning as bug spreads in England after lockdown eased
Fri 16 Jul 2021

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Public health experts in England are warning of an increase in the number of cases of the vomiting bug norovirus after it reached levels last seen before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Official data shows the highly infectious virus is far more widespread than usual for the summer months. It has been spreading particularly rapidly over the past few weeks among preschool children in nurseries and childcare facilities, who are bringing the virus home, causing it to spread across all age groups.

Official data from Public Health England (PHE) showed that in the last five weeks, 154 outbreaks had been reported, compared with an average of 53 between the comparable five-week period around June in the previous five years. Rates have been especially low during the pandemic due to social distancing rules and people paying more attention to hygiene, but have been rising since restrictions began to ease in early April.
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“Norovirus, commonly known as the winter vomiting bug, has been at lower levels than normal throughout the pandemic with less opportunity to spread between people in the community but as restrictions have eased we have seen an increase in cases across all age groups,” said Prof Saheer Gharbia, the deputy director of PHE’s national infection service.

Rates of enteric virus outbreaks, mostly norovirus, doubled from 105 to 236 between 31 May and 4 July, with two-thirds (65%) in nurseries or schools and a third (30%) in care homes.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... down-eased
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weatheriscool
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'Superbug' fungus spread in 2 cities, health officials say
Source: abc



NEW YORK -- U.S. health officials said Thursday they now have evidence of an untreatable fungus spreading in two hospitals and a nursing home.

The “superbug” outbreaks were reported in a Washington, D.C, nursing home and at two Dallas-area hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. A handful of the patients had invasive fungal infections that were impervious to all three major classes of medications.


“This is really the first time we've started seeing clustering of resistance" in which patients seemed to be getting the infections from each other, said the CDC's Dr. Meghan Lyman.

The fungus, Candida auris, is a harmful form of yeast that is considered dangerous to hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems. It is most deadly when it enters the bloodstream, heart or brain. Outbreaks in health care facilities have been spurred when the fungus spread through patient contact or on contaminated surfaces.
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Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory ... s-78994818
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Statistics Say Large Pandemics Are More Likely Than We Thought

Published August 23, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic may be the deadliest viral outbreak the world has seen in more than a century. But statistically, such extreme events aren’t as rare as we may think, asserts a new analysis of novel disease outbreaks over the past 400 years.

The study, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Aug. 23, used a newly assembled record of past outbreaks to estimate the intensity of those events and the yearly probability of them recurring.

It found the probability of a pandemic with similar impact to COVID-19 is about 2% in any year, meaning that someone born in the year 2000 would have about a 38% chance of experiencing one by now. And that probability is only growing, which the authors say highlights the need to adjust perceptions of pandemic risks and expectations for preparedness.

“The most important takeaway is that large pandemics like COVID-19 and the Spanish flu are relatively likely,” said William Pan, Ph.D., associate professor of global environmental health at Duke and one of the paper’s co-authors. Understanding that pandemics aren’t so rare should raise the priority of efforts to prevent and control them in the future, he said.

The study, led by Marco Marani, Ph.D., of the University of Padua in Italy, used new statistical methods to measure the scale and frequency of disease outbreaks for which there was no immediate medical intervention over the past four centuries. Their analysis, which covered a murderer’s row of pathogens including plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus and novel influenza viruses, found considerable variability in the rate at which pandemics have occurred in the past. But they also identified patterns that allowed them to describe the probabilities of similar-scale events happening again.

In the case of the deadliest pandemic in modern history – the Spanish flu, which killed more than 30 million people between 1918 and 1920 -- the probability of a pandemic of similar magnitude occurring ranged from 0.3% to 1.9% per year over the time period studied. Taken another way, those figures mean it is statistically likely that a pandemic of such extreme scale would occur within the next 400 years.

https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/stat ... we-thought
weatheriscool
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A Salmonella Outbreak Has Spread To 17 States And It's Linked To Italian-Style Meats


August 26, 202110:44 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/26/10312399 ... lian-meats
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating two salmonella outbreaks that are tied to Italian-style meats like salami and prosciutto that are often used for charcuterie boards.
Richard Drew/AP

You might want to wait before making your next charcuterie board.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is investigating two salmonella outbreaks in 17 states that are linked to Italian-style meats like "salami, prosciutto, and other meats that can often be found in antipasto or charcuterie assortments."

There is an active investigation underway, but no recalls have been announced.

As of Tuesday, 36 people had fallen ill and 12 were hospitalized, the CDC said. The numbers could be higher, though, because many who have salmonella symptoms don't seek medical care. It also takes three to four weeks to figure out whether a sick person is part of the outbreak.
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caltrek
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Malaria Vaccine Could Save Millions of Children's Lives
by Jamie Prentis
August 26, 2021

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/a ... ens-lives/

Introduction:
(The National) Millions of young African lives could be saved after a study suggested the world’s first malaria vaccine cut deaths and serious illness from the disease by up to 70 per cent.

A trial followed about 6,000 children aged 5-17 months in Burkina Faso and Mali, two countries afflicted heavily by the mosquito-borne disease. Normally, they would be given antimalarial drugs four times during the rainy season when malaria occurs predominantly in the region.

While the use of medicines such as sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine and amodiaquine “is highly effective” in preventing malaria, the disease is still the main cause of death and serious illness among children under the age of 5 in countries such as Burkina Faso and Mali.

But research into the RTS, S/AS01E vaccine, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and co-ordinated by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine with partners in Mali and Burkina Faso, found the combination of the inoculation and antimalarial drugs could reduce the risk of death substantially.

Prof Brian Greenwood from LSHTM said the “results are very striking and could pave the way for a potential new approach to malaria control”.
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caltrek
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A Deadly Fungal Disease on the Rise in the West Has Experts Worried
by Zoya Teirstein
September 15, 2021

https://grist.org/health/valley-fever-r ... ci-fungus/

Extract:
(Grist) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the CDC, estimates that some 150,000 cases of Valley fever go undiagnosed every year, though that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg, doctors and epidemiologists told Grist. The disease is only endemic to certain geographic areas and it’s technically considered an “emerging illness,” even though doctors have been finding it in their patients for more than a century, because cases have been sharply rising in recent years. In some places, astronomically so. According to CDC data, reported Valley Fever cases in the U.S. increased by 32 percent between 2016 and 2018. One study determined that cases in California rose 800 percent between 2000 and 2018.

…some important truths about Valley fever..it is endemic to certain areas of the world, …the fungus that causes the disease lives in soil, …a majority of people infected by it are asymptomatic, and, crucially,…weather patterns and seasonal climate conditions have an effect on the prevalence of Coccidioides.

…There is a massive economic burden associated with the potential expansion of Valley fever into new areas. (Morgan) Gorris (an Earth systems scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) conducted a separate analysis based on future warming scenarios and found that, by the end of the century, the average total annual cost of Valley fever infections could rise to $18.5 billion per year, up from $3.9 billion today.

…Decades have come and gone since researchers first connected the dots between the Cocci fungus and Valley fever. A growing body of research supports the idea that climate change is now making this disease worse. Yet public awareness of what Valley fever is and how it works, in addition to the medical know-how to tackle this disease, is still lacking, even in states where Valley fever is prevalent. “You’d be surprised by how delayed the diagnosis is,” Galgiani, from the Valley Fever Center for Excellence in Arizona, told Grist. “And that’s the patients who get diagnosed.”

…It may only be a matter of time before we start thinking about fungus more often, Barker (a researcher from Northern Arizona University) said. “I honestly think that the fungal pathogens are going to be a huge problem for us going forward.”
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It Gets Worse In Florida As Republicans Want To Review Vaccine Mandates For Measles And Mumps

https://www.politicususa.com/2021/09/23 ... ndate.html

For f*ck's sakes...
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caltrek
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Although the development of malaria vaccine was reported upon earlier in this thread, the United Nations has taken an important step forward in endorsing use of that vaccine:

WHO Endorses ‘Historic’ Malaria Vaccine for At-risk Children
October 6, 2021

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1102362

Introduction:
(United Nations) The World Health Organization (WHO) is recommending widespread use of the world’s first malaria vaccine, in what the UN health agency’s chief described on Wednesday as “an historic day” for the decades-long battle against the deadly disease.

The vaccine is geared towards children, in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions with moderate to high transmission.

The recommendation to begin using the RTS,S vaccine, is based an ongoing pilot programme set up by WHO and partners in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, that has reached more than 800,000 children since 2019.

“The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control”, said the WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Using this vaccine on top of existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year.”

Stagnation in progress

Tedros said the world had made “incredible progress” in the fight against malaria in the past two decades.
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caltrek
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How Biological Detective Work Can Reveal Who Engineered a Virus
by Kelsey Piper
October 24, 2021

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2273 ... ctive-work

Introduction:
(Vox) SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a natural jump from animal to human. And while the US intelligence community’s current best guess is that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,”* the theory has been the subject of much debate and has not been definitively ruled out.

The many unknowns we confront underscore the need for a much bigger toolkit to deal with pathogenic threats than we currently have — which is why a recent paper about a new advance in tracing genetic editing is particularly exciting.

Bioengineering often leaves traces — characteristic patterns in the RNA or DNA of an engineered organism that are a product of a plethora of design decisions that go into synthetic biology. That fact about bioengineered genomes raises an interesting question: What if those traces that gene editing leaves behind were more like fingerprints? That is, what if it’s possible not just to tell if something was engineered but precisely where it was engineered?

That’s the idea behind genetic engineering attribution: the effort to develop tools that let us look at a genetically engineered sequence and determine which lab developed it. A big international contest among researchers earlier this year demonstrates that the technology is within our reach — though it’ll take lots of refining to move from impressive contest results to tools we can reliably use for bio detective work.

The contest, the Genetic Engineering Attribution Challenge, was sponsored by some of the leading bioresearch labs in the world. The idea was to challenge teams to develop techniques in genetic engineering attribution. The most successful entrants in the competition could predict, using machine-learning algorithms, which lab produced a certain genetic sequence with more than 80 percent accuracy, according to a new preprint summing up the results of the contest.
* See this link: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/document ... rigins.pdf
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‘Very concerned’: UK chief vet confirms two more bird flu outbreaks

Thu 9 Dec 2021 08.42 GMT

The UK’s chief vet has expressed alarm at an unprecedented spread of avian flu that has forced 500,000 captive birds to be culled so far this winter.

Christine Middlemiss said she was “very concerned about what’s happening” as the disease continues to hit more poultry farms and bird sanctuaries.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme after confirming two more outbreaks overnight, she said: “We now have a total of 40 infected premises in the UK – that’s a really high number for the time of year for anything we’ve experienced before.” By comparison, there were 26 outbreaks last winter.

Middlemiss confirmed every bird where an outbreak has been confirmed would be killed. She said: “All the birds on the premises have to be culled, because of the ongoing risk of infection that they pose. The total number is something like half a million will now have been culled.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... -outbreaks
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