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SARS false alarm in the UK

on Thu, 09/27/2012 - 09:56
The alarm raised quickly as the news of a Danish family hospitalized in the UK because of SARS infection spreads all over the web. Two of these people had recently been to the Middle East, like the two cases of SARS-like virus recently identified – one of which was lethal.
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Risk communication and social media: two sides of the same coin

on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 12:03
Everything started at the beginning of September in San Francisco, at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, when Dr. Danuta Skowronski, an influenza expert at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, took the floor to speak about her work.

A new coronavirus found in UK

on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 11:53
An infection by a coronavirus belonging to the same family of that responsible for the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has been reported in the United Kingdom. A 49 years old man from Qatari with a travel history to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been admitted to an intensive care unit in Doha, Qatar, on 7 September, with symptoms of acute respiratory syndrome with renal failure.

US schools unprepared for another pandemic

on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 10:47
The American Journal of Infection Control published a study that revealed the insufficient level of pandemic preparedness in U.S. schools. The authors of the study – a team of researchers from Saint Louis University – collected and analyzed survey responses from approximately 2,000 school nurses serving primarily elementary, middle, and high schools in 26 states.

Flu transmission before the appearance of symptoms

on Fri, 08/31/2012 - 10:45
The transmission of flu virus can occur before the onset of symptoms, making the control of epidemics a more difficult task. This is what is suggested by the results obtained by professor Wendy Barclay and colleagues, from the Imperial College of London, and published on PLoS ONE.

New cases of H3N2 swine flu in North America

on Fri, 08/24/2012 - 19:07
Fifty-two new cases of the novel swine-origin H3N2 influenza A virus has been reported in Northern America, mainly in Ohio (26) and Maryland (12), thus raising the total number of infected people to 276 since July 2012.
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Fivefold increase in swine flu in the Midwest America

on Wed, 08/15/2012 - 16:49
A strong increase of cases of a novel swine-origin H3N2 influenza A virus has been reported in the USA, with Indiana and Ohio being the most affected states. First cases occurred in July 2011 and, since last week, only 29 people showed symptoms of this virus infection, but recently the count has quickly raised to 158 cases, mainly children.
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Infectious disease outbreak

on Tue, 07/31/2012 - 00:14
The mysterious disease that killed 14 people in Uganda since the beginning of July 2012 has finally been identified as the Ebola virus. The Ministry of Health (MoH) of Uganda and a World Health Organisation (WHO) representative reported the news after laboratory confirmation was done by the Uganda Virus Research Institute in Entebbe.

A new approach to build weapons against influenza

on Wed, 07/18/2012 - 12:27

In April 2011, a group of researchers from the University of Washington described, in a paper published on Science, a computational method for designing proteins able to bind to the surface of a target macromolecule. They obtained a protein that binds a conserved surface patch on the stem of the influenza hemagglutinin from the 1918 H1N1 pandemic virus, thus inhibiting it.

New study maps hotspots of human-animal infectious diseases

on Thu, 07/05/2012 - 11:34
NAIROBI, KENYA (5 July 2012) - A new global study mapping human-animal diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and Rift Valley fever finds that an “unlucky” 13 zoonoses are responsible for 2.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths per year. The vast majority occur in low- and middle-income countries.

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