Zoonotic Infections News

In 2016, a man walking through a field in Spain was bitten by a tick carrying the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, or CCHF. The man died of the disease, and a nurse who treated him also was infected. It was the first time local transmission of CCHF was documented in Spain, expanding the geographic range of the often fatal infection and giving researchers more evidence of the shifting ranges of some ticks.

Theodore C. (Ted) Eickhoff, MD, professor emeritus in the division of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and longtime Chief Medical Editor of Infectious Disease News, died March 24 at age 86.

The Trump administration’s selection of longtime AIDS researcher Robert R. Redfield, MD, to be the next CDC director drew mixed reactions from experts and officials, including some who question his conduct on a research project several decades ago.

Annual variations in climate across West and East Africa, including temperature suitability and rainfall, contribute to the differences in yellow fever transmission, according to findings published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

In the past 10 years, human monkeypox cases have been reported in African countries that have seen few or no cases in several decades, presenting a serious public health challenge for area health officials and providers, according to researchers.

BOSTON — More women than men presented findings at this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections — a first for the meeting, according the organizers.

BOSTON — For the first time, at this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, more women than men presented findings at the meeting, according to CROI Chair Judith S. Currier, MD, professor of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles. The first authors of 537 of the 990 abstracts that were accepted this year were women, she said.

The FDA recently announced it has approved the Imugen Babesia microti Arrayed Fluorescent Immunoassay for detecting antibodies to Babesia microti in human plasma samples, and the Imugen Babesia microti Nucleic Acid Test for the detection of B. microti DNA in human whole blood samples.

The CDC has announced a multistate outbreak of Salmonella enteritidis infections linked to pet guinea pigs.

A Lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria that began in January is now the largest on record in the West African country, according to WHO.