Alfred Almanza, head of the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), took issue with a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report this week that was critical of some aspects of an FSIS poultry inspection plan, saying the GAO omitted key details.
The GAO report asserted that the USDA took some shortcuts in assessing the plan, called the HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP).
In addition to naming risk groups, the new study found that West Nile in 2012 cost Texas over $47 million.
The World Health Organization's (WHO's) strategy for better hand hygiene in healthcare workers (HCWs) is easily implemented and can make a major impact on patient safety worldwide, says a study published today in Lancet Infectious Diseases.
West Nile virus activity is well below last summer's big spike, but cases have been reported in 42 states so far.
Influenza activity is up "considerably" in South America and southern Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported today, while other scattered regions are also seeing some increase.
An analysis of Dallas County's massive West Nile virus (WNV) outbreak in 2012 found that it was preceded by an unusually mild winter and favored previously known hot spots, researchers reported today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
A 3-year-old boy from Cambodia's eastern Prey Veng province has tested positive for H5N1 avian flu, marking the country's 14th case this year, according to Xinhua, China's state news agency, today.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) yesterday urged its member countries to establish and maintain rapid detection and reporting systems for vancomycin resistance, based on the first isolation of vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) in Latin America.
Canadian health officials said an American man hospitalized in Edmonton after getting sick on a plane tested positive for an H7 virus after traveling to China, though he doesn't have an active flu infection, the Canadian Press reported today.
The elderly man was on a flight from Cairo to San Francisco when he got sick and became unconscious, and the airline diverted the plane to Edmonton.
The World Health Organization's (WHO's) latest monthly update on human H5N1 avian flu infections reported cases in a Cambodian girl whose illness was already reported by the WHO's Western Pacific regional office on May 17 and in an Egyptian woman who died from her illness.