Infection Control News

The United States will commit $5 billion to develop new COVID-19 vaccines and treatments that will work against future variants of SARS-CoV-2, Biden administration officials told reporters.

Final surveillance data released by the CDC on Tuesday confirmed that reported cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis increased between 2020 and 2021 in the United States, totaling more than 2.5 million.

Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, showed signs of returning to its pre-pandemic seasonality this past winter, but researchers cautioned that off-season epidemics are still possible.

COVID-19 remained deadlier than influenza this past season, although the difference in mortality shrunk compared with past years, according to a study comparing outcomes of patients hospitalized with the illnesses.

Infants born to people infected with SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy were five times as likely to test positive for the virus from age 0 to 6 months during the omicron period than previous waves, according to research published in Pediatrics.

Lower vaccination rates led to a surge in cases of one type of vaccine-derived polio last year, according to a report published Thursday in MMWR.

Pediatric asthma diagnoses decreased by more than 50% during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to findings published in Respiratory Research.

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the number of U.S. cases of Candida auris, which has been deemed a pathogen of concern, according to experts.

A survey assessing universal masking showed nearly all facilities represented planned to continue doing so, with the most common reasons being prevention of respiratory viruses and limiting the impact on staff.

Candida auris is an emerging multidrug-resistant yeast causing nosocomial infections. First identified in 2009 in Japan, C. auris has now also been isolated in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.