Wild Coast Raw, based in Olympia, Washington, on March 1 announced a recall of certain lots of its frozen raw pet food for cats after an investigation into severe cat illnesses in Oregon and Washington turned up the outbreak strain of H5 avian flu in some of the company’s products.

The voluntary recall involves certain lots of Wild Coast’s boneless free-range chicken formula, which was distributed to pet food retailers in Oregon and Washington. Six of the affected lots have best buy dates of December 25. The initial alert in the middle of February from Washington’s agriculture department had applied to two lots of the implicated formula.

Last week, Washington’s agriculture department announced more illnesses in domestic cats who were exposed to the food.

Earlier this year, California officials tied cat H5 avian flu illnesses to a different locally produced raw pet food brand, and in late 2024, Oregon health officials linked a cat illness to Northwest Naturals, a raw pet food brand sold nationwide.

More poultry detections in 3 states

In other H5N1 developments, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service today confirmed more H5N1 detections in poultry from three states, all involving backyard birds. Affected states include New York (Suffolk County), North Carolina (Dare County), and Ohio (Portage County). 

A systematic review and meta-analysis found a high level of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria isolated from cancer patients, researchers reported late last week in BMC Infectious Diseases.

Although cancer patients are known to be at increased risk of infections caused by drug-resistant pathogens, there has been no systematic review of the global prevalence of AMR in the common pathogenic bacteria known to cause infections in cancer patients. To address this gap in knowledge, researchers from the University of Ghana Medical School reviewed studies published from 2000 to 2024 on cancer patients with infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Enterococcus faecium, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Enterobacter spp.

The review identified 132 articles involving 49,638 cancer patients in 39 countries. Most studies (67%) reported AMR in multiple pathogens, while 33% reported resistance in single pathogens. For E coli, resistance prevalence was highest for penicillins (81.8%), followed by cotrimoxazole (65.8%) and monobactams (61.6%). For K pneumoniae, the highest prevalence of resistance was observed for penicillins (99.0%) and cotrimoxazole (70.9%), while A baumannii had high resistance prevalence to multiple antimicrobial classes, including third-generation cephalosporins (84.1%), fourth-generation cephalosporins (80.8%), carbapenems (82.6%), fluoroquinolones (80.4%), beta-lactam/beta-lactamase inhibitors (79.2%), cotrimoxazole (75.8%), and aminoglycosides (64.1%).

Enterobacter spp and E faecium showed high resistance prevalence to penicillins, at 91.8% and 90.6% respectively, while P aeruginosa had a high prevalence of resistance to third-generation cephalosporins (49.4%), and S aureus showed high prevalence to macrolides (55.6%) and methicillin (45.3%).

Better infection prevention, antimicrobial stewardship needed

The study authors suggest possible underlying factors for high AMR levels among cancer patients include immunosuppression, prolonged antibiotic exposure, invasive medical devices, and intensive treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

"These procedures and treatments can weaken their immune system, increasing their susceptibility to infections," they wrote. "Moreover, the acquisition of resistant bacteria from healthcare settings is significant, considering that cancer patients spend a substantial amount of time in these facilities."

"The pronounced resistance prevalence observed, especially among ESKAPE pathogens, underscores the urgent need to improve infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship in cancer care globally," they added.

Over the weekend the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a new setback in Uganda's Ebola Sudan outbreak. The country reported a new fatal case, which involved a 4-year-old child who died on February 25.

According to the Associated Press, there were no other details about the death, and local health officials were not commenting on the case. The child died while hospitalized in Kampala, the same city where the index patient, a male nurse, was hospitalized briefly before dying from the virus in late January.

Case count rises to 10

Last month, health authorities maintained that the outbreak was under control after eight patients had recovered, but there is still no clarity about how and where the index patient acquired Ebola. All eight patients had been case contacts of the index case.

The new case raises the death toll to 2, and the case count to 10 in this outbreak. This is the sixth Ebola Sudan outbreak in Uganda's history, with the most recent outbreak identified in 2022. 

After universal hepatitis C virus screening guidelines were updated in 2020, screenings of US pregnant women rose significantly—although uptake remains low in all women, Boston University researchers report in JAMA.

"From 1998 to 2018, hepatitis C virus (HCV) prevalence increased from 0.34 to 5.3 cases per 1,000 pregnancies," the authors wrote. "Guidelines for HCV were updated in March to April 2020 to include onetime screening for all adults and during each pregnancy. Screens for HCV in pregnancy increased after this change to 40.6% in 2021."

The researchers used electronic health records from 68 healthcare organizations on more than 115 million women aged 15 to 45 years who had inpatient and outpatient visits nationwide.

The team compared HCV screening rates for pregnant and nonpregnant women for each 6-month period before and after the 2020 guideline updates. HIV screening rates were used as a negative control.

New vaccine strategies needed

A total of 79,231 HCV tests were performed among pregnant and 678,951 among nonpregnant women. HCV screening per 1,000 person-years climbed from 52 to 117 tests in the pregnant group and 16 to 24 tests in the nonpregnant group.

Perinatal care is a unique health care touchpoint and could be a key time to implement the national HCV elimination plan.

Screening per 1,000 person-years increased from 141 to 253 in pregnant women and from 29 to 37 in nonpregnant women. By December 2022, 38.7% of pregnant women and 8.7% of nonpregnant women had ever been tested for HCV. At the same time, 90.4% of pregnant women had been tested for HIV.

After the HCV guideline update, no immediate change was seen in testing between the pregnancy and control groups. Screenings rose by 21 tests per 1,000 person-years per 6-month interval post-guidance versus pre-guidance change in pregnant compared with nonpregnant women. There was no associated increase in HIV screening.

"The increasing but suboptimal HCV screening suggests innovative strategies are needed to improve HCV diagnosis and treatment," the researchers concluded. "Perinatal care is a unique health care touchpoint and could be a key time to implement the national HCV elimination plan."

• Four countries reported new polio cases last week, including Pakistan, which reported another wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) case, a patient from Sindh province who’s paralysis symptoms began on February 6, according to the latest weekly update from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The country, one of two where WPV1 is still endemic, has now recorded three cases for 2025. Elsewhere, Chad (6), Ethiopia (5), and Yemen (2) reported more circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) cases, all of which had onsets in 2024 and are included in case totals for the previous year. In other developments, three European countries reported more environmental detections of cVDPV2, most involving samples collected this year. 
• The Department of Health and Human Services is evaluating a $590 million contract to Moderna to develop and test mRNA vaccines against pandemic flu threats, including H5N1, Stat reported today, based on a confirmation from the HHS’ communication director. The development was first reported by Bloomberg News. The contract from the HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) was made in January on one of the final days of the Biden administration. 
• Investigators in Bangladesh have detected the country’s first Zika virus cluster, which occurred in Dhaka, the country’s capital, according to study findings reported yesterday by the country’s International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICCDR,B). The study was based on screening in 2023 on 154 patients from Dhaka who had fever or other Zika virus symptoms. The virus was present in five samples, which the team said should prompt wider screening to gauge the true burden of Zika virus in the country. All five patients lived within 1 km of each other and had not traveled outside the country. One was co-infected with dengue virus. Genetic sequencing determined the viruses belonged to the Asian clade, which has been linked to microcephaly and other neurological complications.