Travel alert for Angola upgraded as yellow fever outbreak grows
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday upgraded its travel alert for individuals going to Angola to level 2 out of 3 ("practice enhanced precautions"), recommending that all travelers to the country who are 9 months of age or older be vaccinated for yellow fever, and Angola's ministry of health now requires that anyone of this age entering the country have proof of vaccination, according to the CDC.
Furthermore, the World Health Organization (WHO) in its new Weekly Epidemiologic Record today states that the continuing outbreak of yellow fever in urban Angola should serve as a warning for the need to strengthen prevention and control activities and warned about limited global supply of vaccine.
West Africa, after years of mass vaccination campaigns, saw no yellow fever outbreaks in 2015, says the report. However, similar programs have not been implemented in other parts of Africa.
The total burden of the Angola outbreak, which began last December and has been largely confined to the urban Luanda area, stands as of Apr 4 at 501 lab-confirmed and 1,562 suspected cases, with 225 deaths, the WHO says.
The WHO gave the outbreak a level 2 out of 3 emergency grading earlier this year and, because of the urban concentration of cases and the high risk of outbreak extension, worked with the ministry of health in Angola and other partners to conduct a reactive vaccination campaign targeting 6.4 million individuals in Luanda province.
The WHO states that to effectively curtail transmission of yellow fever, a reactive vaccination campaign needs to achieve 80% coverage within 2 weeks. It took 6 weeks for the campaign to reach 80% coverage of the target population in Luanda province (this has reached 89% as of Apr 4), but not all the urbanized areas in the province have yet reached the target.
The mass vaccination campaigns have faced three challenges, according to the WHO: (1) technical constraints (eg, shortages of vaccination teams, lack of security, cold-chain problems), (2) funding shortages for the purchase of vaccines and program operation, and (3) limited global supplies of yellow fever vaccine.
Extension of the outbreak is a real possibility, the WHO notes. Cases in people entering from Angola have been reported in China (9), Democratic Republic of Congo (3), Kenya (2), and Morocco (10).
The 6-million-dose GAVI-funded emergency stockpile of yellow fever vaccine for 2016 was depleted by the Angola campaigns, with about 1.4 million doses obtained elsewhere. Although the stockpile has since been replenished, the WHO and other international agencies are working to identify sources of more vaccine, including diverting doses intended for routine campaigns.
Apr 7 CDC travel alert
Apr 8 WHO report
Study: Many ICU workers' cell phones harbor resistant Enterobacteriaceae
The cell phones of half of healthcare workers (HCWs) treating very ill children were contaminated with Enterobacteriaceae, with half the isolates resistance to multiple drugs, according to a study yesterday today in the American Journal of Infection Control.
Researchers swabbed the cell phones of 114 HCWs who worked in three pediatric and two neonatology intensive care units (ICUs) in three Peruvian hospitals. They obtained swabs every other week for an average of four swabs per phone during the 5-month study.
Three quarters of the HCWs said they never decontaminated their phones, and 47% reported using their phones in the ICU more than five times while working.
The team found that half of the phones were colonized with an Enterobacteriaceae at least once during the study period. Half of the isolates were multidrug resistant, and 33% were extended-spectrum beta-lactamase producers. Findings were "apparently randomly distributed through the hospitals without clear clustering or strongly associated risk factors for having a positive sample," the authors wrote.
Apr 7 Am J Infect Control abstract