Prolonged Zika Virus Viremia During Pregnancy (
New England Journal of Medicine) We describe a case of Zika virus infection during pregnancy in a Colombian woman. She was infected in December 2015 while she was visiting her home country. At 9 weeks' gestation, she had a self-limited maculopapular, nonconfluent rash for 3 days that affected her trunk, arms, and legs; she had no fever or other concurrent symptoms. She was screened for ZIKV and other flaviviruses.
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Biological Agents & Infectious Diseases
Hungary Reports Widespread Avian Flu in Poultry (
CIDRAP) The World Organization of Animal Health today released a slew of European avian influenza reports that included details of multiple outbreaks in Hungarian poultry, while Japan says highly pathogenic avian flu has been found in 41 wild birds.
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Plague: Dozens of Cases in Madagascar (
Outbreak News Today) Plague, a disease many think of as something from the history books, is alive and well in many areas of the globe and is clearly no stranger to Madagascar. During the last decade, the island country reported more than 7,000 human plague cases, second most on the planet.
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Government Affairs & National Security
Senate Passes Landmark 21st Century Cures Act - but It Will Take Years to Implement (
STAT) It took nearly three years for Congress to pass the 21st Century Cures Act. The next question is: How long will it take the Food and Drug Administration to implement it? The legislation, designed to accelerate the introduction of new medical treatments by speeding up some FDA approval processes and boosting federal funding, passed the Senate Wednesday by a 94 to 5 vote on Wednesday.
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Global Health Security
Eliminating Cholera Transmission in Haiti (
New England Journal of Medicine: Perspective) When Hurricane Matthew struck on October 4, 2016, it left 1.4 million people in southern Haiti in need of urgent humanitarian assistance; it destroyed homes and health care facilities, flooded water sources with runoff, ruined crops, killed livestock, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Looming as the next act in the disaster is a resurgence in endemic cholera.
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Implementation of Syndromic Surveillance Systems in Two Rural Villages in Senegal (
PLOS: Neglected Tropical Diseases) Infectious diseases are still a major public health problem for humanity, especially because of their unpredictability. In this context, developing surveillance systems is one of the most effective solutions to fight them, including in Sub-Saharan African countries where the situation is particularly worrying. This study describes how automated surveillance systems have been implemented in two rural areas in Senegal for the weekly surveillance of 15 pathogens responsible for fever in Africa and on the basis of laboratory data from two rural laboratories.
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Medicine & Public Health
A Diverse Intrinsic Antibiotic Resistome from a Cave Bacterium (
Nature Communications) Antibiotic resistance is ancient and widespread in environmental bacteria. These are therefore reservoirs of resistance elements and reflective of the natural history of antibiotics and resistance. In a previous study, we discovered that multi-drug resistance is common in bacteria isolated from Lechuguilla Cave, an underground ecosystem that has been isolated from the surface for over 4 Myr.
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US Life Expectancy Declines for the First Time Since 1993 (
Washington Post) For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year - a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the US. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death.
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Comparative Analysis of Dengue and Zika Outbreaks Reveals Differences by Setting and Virus (
PLOS: Neglected Tropical Diseases) The pacific islands of Micronesia have experienced several outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases over the past decade. In outbreaks on small islands, the susceptible population is usually well defined, and there is no co-circulation of pathogens. Because of this, analysing such outbreaks can be useful for understanding the transmission dynamics of the pathogens involved, and particularly so for yet understudied pathogens such as Zika virus.
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Science & Technology
Hacking Rules for E. coli (
Nature Biotechnology) Changing the codons used in the genetic code promises to enable the creation of new types of organisms, endow life with new functions and result in industrial strains capable of enhanced protein production. But the rules for swapping out codons--those changes that are allowed and those that are not--remain unclear.
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Child Mummy Found with Oldest Known Smallpox Virus (
National Geographic) A multinational team of researchers, headed by a group at the DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University in Ontario, have retrieved and sequenced smallpox DNA from the mummified body of a child interred in Lithuania in the 17th century.
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See Also:
17th Century Variola Virus Reveals the Recent History of Smallpox (
Current Biology) Smallpox holds a unique position in the history of medicine. It was the first disease for which a vaccine was developed and remains the only human disease eradicated by vaccination. Although there have been claims of smallpox in Egypt, India, and China dating back millennia, the timescale of emergence of the causative agent, variola virus, and how it evolved in the context of increasingly widespread immunization, have proven controversial.
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Other 21st Century Threats
The Nuclear Threat Environment Facing the Trump Administration (
War on the Rocks) With Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election, the American people can expect the new administration to author a
Nuclear Posture Review that is likely to differ significantly from the Obama administration's 2010
Nuclear Posture Review. This is primarily because the two men have fundamentally different worldviews. Whatever direction the new administration takes, one thing is certain: The nation's adversaries pose an increasingly daunting challenge when it comes to nuclear weapons.
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