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University of Nebraska Medical Center

Category: Emerging Infectious Diseases

The World Is Addicted to Chicken. So Is the Bird Flu Virus

(Bloomberg) The bird flu outbreak ravaging global poultry flocks is now the worst since records began, driving a spike in the price of eggs, threatening free-range chicken and risking long-term impacts to animal health. The avian flu season traditionally begins each October as migratory birds shed infected droppings or saliva while leaving cool areas of the Northern Hemisphere. But this year cases spread […]

Dec 19, 2022

Just How Bad Is the ‘Tripledemic’?

(NYT) After two difficult Covid winters, the current season of respiratory sickness already rivals some of the worst cold and flu seasons on record — and it started about two months early. R.S.V., or respiratory syncytial virus, has made so many young children ill this fall that weekly pediatric hospitalizations for R.S.V. are the highest recorded. Influenza, […]

Dec 16, 2022

Tripledemic Update: RSV, Covid And Flu

(Forbes) The United States has already plunged into one of the roughest seasons of winter illnesses in decades. After nearly three years of being sequestered, children and adults are back out in crowds, with no masks, no distancing, and viruses waiting with open arms. Well, open RNA strands, at least. We’ve rounded the bend on […]

Dec 16, 2022

U.S. Offers Free At-Home Covid Tests as Part of Winter Plan

(New York Times) With cases on the rise, the Biden administration restarted a program that has provided hundreds of millions of tests through the Postal Service. Households are now able to order four tests at covidtests.gov, with shipments beginning next week.

Dec 16, 2022

We’ve run out of cholera vaccines, WHO official says as disease surges

(Reuters) The global stockpile of cholera vaccines the World Health Organization helps manage is “currently empty or extremely low”, a WHO official said on Friday amid a resurgence of the disease around the world. The U.N. health agency says global fatality rates are rising and there are around 30 countries around the world that have […]

Dec 16, 2022

The Coronavirus May Spread From Corpses, Scientists Report

(NYT) Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies. The risk of contagion is mainly to those who handle cadavers, like pathologists, medical examiners and health care workers, and in settings like hospitals and […]

Dec 16, 2022

Farewell, Fauci

(MedPageToday) VIDEO Anthony Fauci, MD, talks about retirement, pandemics, and “The Godfather” with Jeremy Faust, MD In this exclusive video, Jeremy Faust, MD, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, sits down for a conversation with Anthony Fauci, MD, before his departure from the NIH at the end of the year. The following is a transcript of their remarks: […]

Dec 16, 2022

Increase in invasive Group A streptococcal infections among children in Europe, including fatalities

(WHO) A number of European countries (including France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom) have indicated an increase in 2022, particularly since September, in the number of cases of invasive Group A streptococcal (iGAS) disease among children under 10 years of age.  During the same period, several deaths associated with iGAS disease in children […]

Dec 13, 2022

China Covid: Hospitals under strain in wave of infections

(BBC) China’s hospitals are already under so much pressure, following the country’s rapid 180-degree shift in Covid policy that doctors and nurses could be infecting patients. It seems frontline medical workers are being told to come in even if they have the virus themselves because of staff shortages.

Dec 13, 2022

SARS-CoV-2 Variant Updates

(Univ of Nebraska Medical Center)

Dec 13, 2022