News

The California measles outbreak that began in December 2014 is over, announces Dr. Karen Smith, director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and state health officer. No new outbreak-related measles cases have been reported to CDPH for two 21-day incubation periods (42 days), allowing public health officials to declare the outbreak that infected 131 Californians to be over.

Soon after the birth of her second child, a daughter she named Neema, Tabu Kalama found herself homeless and with no regular income. Kalama had no option but to sleep with her newborn daughter and her 18-month old son in the meager shelter of palm trees near the beach in Kilifi, in eastern Kenya. It was June, among the coolest and wettest months there. “I was so worried that the baby would fall sick, and there was nothing that I could do,” Kalama says.

As part of early recovery efforts, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to work closely with national authorities and partners in the three high-transmission Ebola countries on how to rebuild confidence and trust in health systems and services. Nurse Sai Conteh works at the Kambia Government Hospital and needs to know what to do in case one day a patient with Ebola-like symptoms comes to the hospital. She looks back at what she has learnt and how different her daily work looks like.

A global study on canine rabies has found that 160 people die every single day from the disease. The report is the first study to consider the impact in terms of deaths and the economic costs of rabies across all countries. Even though the disease is preventable, the study says that around 59,000 people die every year of rabies transmitted by dogs.

Can a robot clean a hospital room just as well as a person? According to new research out of the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, that is indeed the case. Chetan Jinadatha, MD, MPH, assistant professor at the Texas A&M College of Medicine and chief of infectious diseases at the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System in Temple, is studying the effectiveness of a germ-zapping robot to clean hospital rooms, which could hold the key to preventing the spread of "superbugs" - in turn, saving countless dollars and, most importantly, lives.

This Report examines surface cleaning and disinfection in the face of emerging infectious disease and the pathogens that can challenge disinfectant efficacy. It reviews the hierarchy of pathogen resistance and susceptibility to disinfectants, discusses various factors that impact disinfectant efficacy, and addresses current pathogens of concern.

The story of how Liberia’s most populous county, Montserrado, turned around an exponentially growing Ebola outbreak is intriguing. The World Health Organization (WHO)’s team and national officials, aided by veterans from WHO’s polio eradication group in India, decentralized the response, using quality management principles that empowered local teams and held them accountable for results. These local sector teams involved more than 4,000 community members, using business best practices and an incident management system to vastly improve surveillance, case finding, contact tracing, and overall management of key response activities.