Healthcare & Laboratory News

Healio (5/9, Feller) reports, “Belize, Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines became the latest nations to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) announced.” This “has now been achieved by 19 countries globally, including 11 in the Americas, according to PAHO.” The World Health Organization “awards a certification of elimination to nations that have a mother-to-child HIV transmission rate under 5%, provide antenatal care and ART treatment for more than 90% of pregnant women, report fewer than 50 new cases of congenital syphilis per 100,000 newborns and achieve an HIV case rate of fewer than 500 per 100,000 live births.”

MedPage Today (5/9, Putka) says, “Three patients developed difficult-to-treat Mycobacterium abscessus infections after receiving embryonic stem cell injections in Mexico in 2022, researchers reported.” Two men “acquired the infections in Guadalajara and Baja California, Mexico, from donor embryonic stem cell injections for joint pain, reported” researchers in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Previously, a third patient “had received intrathecal donor embryonic stem cell injections, also in Baja California, to treat her multiple sclerosis and also contracted an M. abscessus infection.”

The New York Times (5/9, Mandavilli, Qiu, Anthes) reports, “Even as it has become increasingly clear that the bird flu outbreak on the nation’s dairy farms began months earlier – and is probably much more widespread – than previously thought, federal authorities have emphasized that the virus poses little risk to humans.” However, “there is a group of people who are at high risk for infection: the estimated 100,000 men and women who work on those farms. There has been no widespread testing to see how many may be infected. None have been vaccinated against bird flu.” This “leaves the workers and their families vulnerable to a poorly tracked pathogen. And it poses broader public health risks. If the virus were to find its way into the wider population, experts say, dairy workers would be a likely route.”

MedPage Today (5/9, Kahn) reports, “Clinicians prescribed hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin inappropriately to thousands of children with acute COVID-19, according to a retrospective cohort study” published in Pediatrics. Overall, “in a large U.S. all-payer database, 3,602 ivermectin prescriptions and 813 HCQ prescriptions for kids with acute COVID were identified after” IDSA “guidelines recommended against their use, though prescription rates for these medications were less than 1% – 0.03% for HCQ and 0.14% for ivermectin, reported” researchers.

NBC News (5/9, Venkatraman) reports, “National health care officials are sounding the alarm this month on the disproportionate impact of hepatitis B on Asian American communities, encouraging them to get tested and, if needed, vaccinated.” Out of the 580,000 to 1.17 million patients “who suffer from the virus in the U.S., 58% are Asian, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a drastic percentage considering Asian Americans only comprise around 7% of the U.S. population, but experts say it can be explained by the high rates of the disease across Asia.”

MedPage Today (5/9, Kahn) says, “Nearly three dozen babies and young children have received respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines, which are only approved for adults, according to a brief CDC report.” Data “revealed 27 reports of the Pfizer RSV vaccine (Abrysvo) and seven reports of the GSK RSV vaccine (Arexvy) being mistakenly administered to children under the age of 2 between Aug. 21, 2023 and March 18, 2024,” researchers detailed in Pediatrics.

Infectious Disease Advisor (5/9, Barowski) reports, “Outbreaks of Legionella in drinking water have increased over time and are the primary cause of hospitalization and mortality due to waterborne disease, according to study results published in MMWR Surveillance Summaries.” According to the study, “in public water systems, Legionella was the most implicated etiology and linked with 160 (92%) outbreaks, 666 (60%) incident diagnoses, 462 (97%) hospitalizations, and 68 (97%) deaths related to community and noncommunity water systems.”

Infectious Disease Advisor (5/8, Kuhns) reports, “Although the incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease, all-cause pneumonia, and acute otitis media (AOM) has decreased in children aged 48 months and younger, the burden of pneumococcal disease remains substantial in this population. These study results were published in Vaccine.” According to the study, “in children who were commercially insured, the overall annual incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease declined from 53 to 7 episodes per 100,000 person-years between 1998 and 2019.” And “in children insured by Medicaid, the overall annual incidence of invasive pneumococcal disease declined from 58 to 9 episodes per 100,000 person-years between 2001 and 2019.”

Reuters (5/8, Rigby) reports, “European countries have reported a surge in whooping cough cases in 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, with 10 times as many identified as in each of the previous two years.” Overall, almost “60,000 cases were reported by European Union and European Economic Area countries over the period, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said on Wednesday, with 11 deaths in infants and eight among older adults.” The agency said lower vaccination rates during the COVID-19 pandemic may be contributing to the outbreak.

The New York Times (5/8, Anthes) reports, “Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet – including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species – are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study.” The research, published in Nature, “suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life.” However, “in what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease.” The Washington Post (5/8, Dance) reports, “Researchers said the study is the first to look at the ways such a variety of environmental problems can compound disease risks. It combined hundreds of studies and thousands of observations of all kinds of creatures – humans and other mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, worms and arthropods – and all kinds of pathogens, such as viruses, bacteria and fungi.”