The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last night released a detailed analysis of H5N1 avian flu samples taken from a patient in Texas who was exposed to sick cows, which suggests that the infection might involve the eyes but perhaps not the upper respiratory tract.
Also, when CDC scientists compared the human H5N1 samples to viruses from cattle, wild birds, and poultry, they found in the human sample a mutation with known links to host adaptation.
Comments closedFederal and state health officials today reported that a person connected to a dairy farm in Texas has tested positive for H5N1 avian flu, the first known case linked to sick dairy cows and the nation’s second since the virus began circulating in wild bird and poultry in 2022.
Today’s case announcement underscores new interim guidance that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released over the weekend on preventing, detecting, and responding to avian flu infections in humans, which are very rare and mainly pose a threat to people who are exposed to sick animals or contaminated environments.
Comments closedExperts worry a recent rise in long COVID cases — fueled by a spike in winter holiday infections and a decline in masking and other measures — could continue into this year.
A sudden rise in long COVID in January has persisted into a second month. About 17.6% of those surveyed by the Census Bureau in January said they have experienced long COVID. The number for February was 17.4.
Compare these new numbers to October 2023 and earlier, when long COVID numbers hovered between 14% and 15% of the US adult population as far back as June 2022.
Comments closedAs part of its updates on strategies to battle respiratory viruses, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on March 22 detailed steps that people can take to reduce the number of respiratory particles that circulate in indoor air. The ventilation guidance update comes as respiratory disease levels such as flu and COVID are declining from a late December peak.
The CDC said ventilation, alongside vaccination and practicing good hand hygiene, is one of the core strategies for protecting people against respiratory illness. “People can still get sick after ventilating a space, so it is important to use ventilation as one part of a multi-layered approach to protect ourselves against getting sick from respiratory viruses,” the CDC said.
Comments closedThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday mothballed its longstanding COVID isolation guidance, announcing that people no longer need to isolate for five days after catching the coronavirus. Instead, per the CDC, they should stay home if they feel sick but can leave home and resume normal activities as soon as their symptoms are getting better and its been a day since they had a fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication). That means that the CDC is now both streamlining and simplifying its recommendations and advising people to treat their COVID infections like they would the flu or any other respiratory illness — even though the novel coronavirus is nothing like the flu or other common respiratory viruses.
Many public-health experts are backing the move, which is the first major change the CDC has made to the guidance since it reduced the isolation period from ten days to five in late 2021 and had been previewed last month in a report by the Washington Post. The CDC and the experts supporting the plan have noted that it makes sense for the agency to align its isolation guidance with how everyone is now living with COVID, four years after the start of the pandemic. That new normal is that COVID isn’t going away and people are still catching it, but the threat it poses and harm is causes continues to decline thanks to virtually everyone having some form of immunity owing to prior infection or the administration of widely available vaccines, in addition to the availability of effective life-saving antiviral treatments like Paxlovid.
Comments closedComments closedThe changes in the CDC guidelines [now] are really a result of political and corporate pressure. It’s a dangerous change that goes against the science, encourages disease spread, and prioritizes corporate interests, making it easier to exploit workers.
The overwhelmingly abundant evidence for this virus over the past 4 years tells us that it is a far more dangerous pathogen than flu, which lacks seasonality, is still evolving, has induced Long Covid in tens of millions of throughout the world, and cannot be ‘FLU-ified.’
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COVID-19 patients are at least four times more likely to develop chronic fatigue than someone who has not had the virus, a new federal study published Wednesday suggests.
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) looked at electronic health records from the University of Washington of more than 4,500 patients with confirmed COVID-19 between February 2020 and February 2021.
They were followed for a median of 11.4 months and their health data was compared with the data of more than 9,000 non-COVID-19 patients with similar characteristics.
Fatigue developed in 9% of the COVID patients, the team found. Among COVID-19 patients, the rate of new cases of fatigue was 10.2 per 100 person-years and the rate of new cases of chronic fatigue was 1.8 per 100 person-years.
Comments closedAs seasonal virus activity surges across the United States, experts stress the importance of preventive measures – such as masking and vaccination – and the value of treatment for those who do get sick.
Tens of thousands of people have been admitted to hospitals for respiratory illness each week this season. During the week ending December 23, there were more than 29,000 patients admitted with Covid-19, about 15,000 admitted with the flu and thousands more with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Comments closedOnly 4.5% of a cohort of pediatric COVID-19 patients admitted to US hospitals during the period of Omicron predominance had completed their primary COVID-19 vaccine series, and 7.0% had started but didn’t finish the series, The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal reports.
The study team, led by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researchers, enrolled 597 vaccine-eligible COVID-19 inpatients aged 8 months to 4 years at 28 hospitals participating in the Overcoming COVID-19 network from September 2022 to May 2023. A total of 62.1% of patients were aged 8 months to 1 year, and 37.9% were aged 2 to 4 years.
Comments closedThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday that COVID subvariant JN.1 accounts for 39% to 50% of cases in the United States as of Dec. 23, according to the agency’s projections.
Comments closedThe new COVID-19 variant that scientists call JN.1 now makes up about 44.1% of COVID-19 cases across the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Friday, marking another week of the fast-spreading variant’s steep rise in the U.S.
The increase is more than two times larger than the 21.3% that the CDC now estimates the strain made up of infections for the week ending Dec. 9, after Thanksgiving.
Comments closedHospitals and emergency rooms could be forced to ration care by the end of this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday, saying recent trends in COVID-19 and influenza are now on track to again strain America’s health care system. The new COVID variant JN.1 is making up an increasing share of cases, the CDC’s tracking shows.
“COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising quickly,” the agency said in its weekly update. “Since the summer, public health officials have been tracking a rise in multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which is caused by COVID-19. Influenza activity is growing in most parts of the country. RSV activity remains high in many areas.”
Comments closedU.S. life expectancy rose last year — by more than a year — but still isn’t close to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 2022 rise was mainly due to the waning pandemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said Wednesday. But even with the large increase, U.S. life expectancy is only back to 77 years, 6 months — about what it was two decades ago.
Comments closedNearly 1 in 10 new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are from the BA.2.86 variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Monday, nearly triple what the agency estimated the highly mutated variant’s prevalence was two weeks ago.
Comments closedAmid an uptick in Covid infections, administrators, staff and patients are divided over the need for masks in health care settings.
Comments closedNurses, researchers and workplace safety officers worry new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might reduce protection against the coronavirus and other airborne pathogens in hospitals.
Comments closedThe U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director on Tuesday signed off on broad use of updated COVID-19 vaccines approved by the government – covering ages 6 months and up – as the country prepares to start a vaccination campaign within days.
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