Nigeria: After Six Months, Meningitis Outbreak over (
Outbreak News Today) The meningococcal meningitis C outbreak in Nigeria that began in mid-December 2016 in Zamfara State has been declared over, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control Friday. The Emergency Operations Centre responding to the epidemic has stepped down as the outbreak has been in constant decline for eight weeks.
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Domestic Preparedness & Response
EMS Infectious Disease Playbook (
HHS/ASPR/TRACIE) This document was created using official or best practice information taken from multiple organizations that was vetted and assembled by subject matter experts working for the Technical Resources, Assistance Center, and Information Exchange at the request of the US Department of Health and Human Services/Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. The aim was not to develop novel guidance for emergency medical services agencies, but to unify multiple sources of information in a single planning document addressing the full spectrum of infectious agents to create a concise reference resource for EMS agencies developing their service policies.
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Government Affairs & National Security
Global Health Security
Tens of Thousands Have Fled Violence in Congo Republic (
Thomson Reuters Foundation) More than 80,000 people have fled their homes in Pool province surrounding Congo Republic's capital since the government began a military operation there last year, a joint UN and government statement said. The campaign, involving occasional aerial bombardments, aims to curb what the government says is a resurgent rebellion led by Pastor Ntumi, an enemy of President Denis Sassou Nguesso from the oil-rich country's 1997 civil war.
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Stopping Pandemics Before They Start (
New York Times) Imagine that enemies possessed a class of weapons with which they attacked your people from time to time. Decades could go by with no attack, but eventually one would come. Imagine also that these weapons were growing more potent, and the attacks were becoming more frequent.
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Medicine & Public Health
CDC's EIS Program Molds Clinicians into Public Health Professionals (
Healio) The EIS program is famous in the medical community for investigating outbreaks around the globe. Many of its reports, including Dirlikov's dispatch about the rabies case, are published in
MMWR. But the program is less well known by the general public, despite having its boot prints on some of the biggest health crises of the last 60-plus years.
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Science & Technology
Oxford Nanopore's Hand-held DNA Analyzer Has Traveled the World (
MIT Technology Review) Last June, a British-Brazilian scientific team boarded a bus that had been turned into a makeshift laboratory and headed out to tour six cities across northeastern Brazil. The researchers were there to find mosquitoes infected with the Zika virus and sequence its genome in their blood, since the evolution of the viral genome contains clues to the epidemic's origins. But rather than collect insects and send the samples back to a central lab, they'd outfitted the bus with everything they needed to do the research. The most important item: a DNA sequencer about the size and weight of a deck of cards that runs off a laptop USB plug and costs just $1,000.
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Other 21st Century Threats