Zoonotic Infections News

There have been 153 cases of chikungunya virus reported in 32 US states and territories as of July 8, according to the CDC.

Although posaconazole therapy demonstrated antitrypanosomal activity in the treatment of Chagas’ disease, patients experienced more treatment failure during follow-up than when traditional benznidazole therapy was used.

West Nile virus was the leading arboviral disease in the United States in 2013, with 2,469 cases reported, and 51% of those cases were neuroinvasive disease, according to the CDC.

An 80-year-old man from Tennessee was the first fatal case of Heartland virus and the only case described outside of the recent cases in Missouri, according to a report in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Over the past several months, chikungunya virus infection has become a severe epidemic in the Caribbean and the Americas. The disease has affected thousands of people, and the abundance and wide distribution of its vectors increase the risk for further transmission.

The Tennessee Department of Health said it is investigating possible cases of chikungunya virus infection in the state after several travelers returned from the Caribbean and now have symptoms of the disease, according to a press release.

Using unbiased next-generation sequencing of cerebrospinal fluid, physicians at the University of California, San Francisco, diagnosed leptospirosis in a 14-year-old boy with fever and headache that progressed to hydrocephalus and status epilepticus, according to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers from Oregon State University have unearthed evidence in the form of fossilized ticks that the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi, existed long before human beings, according to a university press release.

As of May 30, there have been 103,018 suspected cases and 4,406 laboratory-confirmed cases of chikungunya virus infection reported in the Caribbean and South America, according to the CDC.

At least 62% of the laboratory tests performed for Lyme disease at commercial laboratories were conducted as part of the two-tiered testing approach recommended by the CDC for evaluating patients suspected to have the disease, according to a report in Clinical Infectious Diseases.