On Sunday, Jan. 26, the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) announced that a Maricopa County resident has been diagnosed with the 2019 Novel Coronavirus. The confirmed case is in a person who recently returned from travel to Wuhan, China. The case is a member of the Arizona State University community who does not live [...]
Disease outbreaks can come from anywhere. In Arizona we’ve had illness from contaminated pomegranate seeds from the Middle East, measles from Switzerland, salmonellosis from African dwarf frogs and cholera from Peru. More recently a Canadian traveler died of H5N1 after she returned home from a long trip to China. An exotic disease from another country is only [...]
This Spring marks 10 years since Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) arrived on the global public health scene. It started as a mystery illness in SE Asia- without name, origin, or cure in February of 2003. The CDC immediately began working with the World Health Organization to investigate the outbreak. Public health scientists across the globe [...]
Just as we expected, the sample that we tested for H7N9 influenza today was negative. Thanks to our Lab team for staying a little late this evening to run the test. Even though it was very likely to be negative from the beginning- it's still important to follow up on every lead. After all, vigilance [...]
China is continuing to report more and more cases of the new H7N9 Influenza virus. So far they’ve confirmed 108 cases with a death rate of about 20% (21 deaths) All the cases appear to have jumped from birds to humans- meaning that there’s no human-to-human transmission (which is good). One concern is that if a person becomes infected [...]
