Preliminary testing of two dead birds collected in Kowloon has indicated suspected cases of H5 avian influenza, a spokesman for the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) said today (January 18), adding that further confirmatory tests are being conducted.
A biological test showed an outbreak of bird flu at a poultry farm in southwestern Japan last week was due to a highly virulent type within the H5N1 strain of the virus, a farm ministry official said.
The National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health (NPWH) announced its endorsement of routine HPV testing of women age 30 and over as part of cervical cancer prevention, along with an initiative to educate the medical community and patients, said Digene Corp. (Nasdaq: DIGE). HPV is the cause of cervical cancer, and Digene markets the only FDA-approved HPV test, The Digene(R) HPV Test, which detects high-risk types of the virus.
In a study of nonhuman primates infected with the influenza virus that killed 50 million people in 1918, an international team of scientists has found a critical clue to how the virus killed so quickly and efficiently.
A World Health Organization plan to track transmitted resistance to HIV drugs in Botswana could fail because the threshold the organization has set is too high, according to new UCLA research.
Two antiviral drugs, oseltamivir and zanamivir, are highly effective when given as a preventive measure to reduce the spread of the influenza virus.
Measuring a patient’s ratio of white blood cell types may help physicians accurately distinguish between the similar conditions infectious mononucleosis and bacterial tonsillitis, potentially guiding treatment decisions, according to an article in the January issue of Archives of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
A study of nearly 4,000 HIV-infected people in Denmark, matched with about 380,000 people who were not infected, found that people diagnosed with HIV infection between 1995-2005 had a shorter life expectancy (20 years beyond age 25) than the general population (51 years beyond age 25).
Japanese officials confirmed that bird flu caused the deaths of more than two-thousand chickens at a farm 900 kilometers southwest of Tokyo. The officials have not determined whether this particular strain of bird flu is the feared H5N1 or another less deadly form.
The Indonesian health officials have confirmed about two women died after contracting bird flu, raising the country’s total number of human deaths to 61.