“Six more people, most of them health care workers, have contracted the deadly MERS virus in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the [WHO] said Thursday,” Agence France-Presse reports (7/18). “The latest infections of four women and two men aged between 26 and 42 bring the global total to…

“The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS) is not a ‘public health emergency of international concern,’ the emergency committee of the [WHO] said on Wednesday,” Reuters reports (Nebehay, 7/17). “The committee felt that the ‘dramatic action’ of declaring an emergency would be disproportionate and might do more harm than good,…

“The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization on Tuesday for a diagnostic test to detect the presence of the Middle East coronavirus at the request of the [CDC],” Reuters reports. “The emergency approval follows the Health and Human Services secretary’s determination that the virus called Middle East Respiratory…

“Cambodia’s outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza continues apace as the summer wears on, with a three-year-old boy becoming the 14th victim this year and the 35th case confirmed in the Southeast Asian nation since records began to be kept,” GlobalPost reports. “Avian influenza has been an issue in Cambodia for…

The New York Times examines a mystery illness infecting children in Muzaffarpur, “one of India’s most impoverished areas.” The newspaper writes, “Although public health statistics are unreliable here, the disease is believed to infect tens of thousands of people a year and kill thousands,” adding, “All doctors know is that…

“To put [the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus] in perspective and to understand what’s happening and what could happen next, GlobalPost spoke with Dr. Anthony Mounts, WHO’s technical lead on the coronavirus,” the news service reports. Mounts discusses why the agency established an emergency committee to examine MERS, how…

“International health experts began urgent talks on the Middle East coronavirus (MERS) on Tuesday amid concerns about larger numbers of milder infections possibly going undetected, the [WHO] said,” Reuters reports. “The United Nations agency announced last Friday that it was forming an emergency committee, to convene this week, to prepare…

“The new H7N9 virus linked to China’s recent outbreak is well equipped to bind to both avian and human receptors, invade the human lower respiratory tract, and replicate efficiently, a Chinese research team found after putting the virus though its paces in a host of laboratory tests,” CIDRAP News reports,…

“Pakistan has been hit by a measles epidemic that has claimed the lives of hundreds of children since the start of the year, almost as many as in the whole of 2012,” the Wall Street Journal’s “India Real Time” blog reports. “The [WHO] has recorded nearly 30,000 cases and 290…

“The [WHO] is to convene an emergency committee next week on the deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), WHO assistant director-general for health security and environment Keiji Fukuda said Friday,” Xinhua reports (7/5). Fukuda “told reporters Friday that the names of the disease experts on the team would be…