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May 27, 2023

HIV/AIDS Fast Facts | CNN

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CNN
—

Here’s a look at the origins, treatments and global response to HIV and AIDS.

HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus.

AIDS stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

HIV/AIDS is spread through sexual contact with an infected person, sharing needles with an infected person, through transfusions of infected blood or through an infected mother.

People infected with HIV go through three stages of infection:

Acute infection, or acute retroviral syndrome, which can produce flu-like symptoms in the first month after infection.
Clinical latency, or asymptomatic HIV infection, in which HIV reproduces at lower levels.
AIDS, in which the amount of CD4 cells fall below 200 cells per cubic millimeter of blood (as opposed to the normal level of 500-1,500).

HIV-1 and HIV-2 can both cause AIDS. HIV-1 is the most common human immunodeficiency virus; HIV-2 is found mostly in western Africa.

Antiretroviral therapy (ART) involves taking a cocktail of HIV medications used to treat the virus. In 1987, Azidothymidine (AZT) became the first FDA-approved drug used to attempt to treat HIV/AIDS.

from UNAIDS:

38.4 million – Number of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide in 2021.

5.9 million – Approximate number of people living with HIV globally that are unaware of their HIV-positive status in 2021.

160,000 – Newly infected children worldwide in 2021.

1.5 million – New infections worldwide in 2021.

650,000 – Approximate number of AIDS-related deaths worldwide in 2021.

Of the 4,500 new infections each day in 2019, 59% are in sub-Saharan Africa.

40.1 million – Approximate number of AIDS-related deaths worldwide since the start of the epidemic.

Sub-Saharan Africa is comprised of the following countries: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, South Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

1981 – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publish the first reports of men in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco who were previously healthy and are suffering from rare forms of cancer and pneumonia, accompanied by “opportunistic infections.”

1982 – The CDC refer to the disease as AIDS for the first time.

1983 – French and American researchers determine that AIDS is caused by HIV.

1985 – Blood tests to detect HIV are developed.

December 1, 1988 – First World AIDS Day.

1999 – Researchers in the United States find evidence that HIV-1 most likely originated in a population of chimpanzees in West Africa. The virus appears to have been transmitted to people who hunted, butchered and consumed the chimpanzees for food.

January 29, 2003 – In his State of the Union speech, US President George W. Bush promises to dramatically increase funding to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.

May 27, 2003 – Bush signs H.R. 1298, the US Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003, also known as PEPFAR (US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), that provides $15 billion over the next five years to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria abroad, particularly in Africa.

July 30, 2008 – H.R. 5501, The Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008, becomes law and authorizes up to $48 billion to combat global HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Through 2013, PEPFAR plans to work in partnership with host nations to support treatment for at least four million people, prevention of 12 million new infections and care for 12 million people.

October 2011 – In his book, “The Origins of AIDS,” Dr. Jacques Pepin traces the emergence and subsequent development of HIV/AIDS to suggest that initial AIDS outbreaks began earlier than previously believed.

July 24, 2012 – Doctors announce during the 19th International AIDS Conference that Timothy Ray Brown, known as the “Berlin patient,” has been clinically “cured” of HIV. Brown, diagnosed with leukemia, underwent a bone marrow transplant in 2007 using marrow from a donor with an HIV-resistant mutation. He no longer has detectable HIV.

March 3, 2013 – Researchers announce that a baby born infected with HIV has been “functionally cured.” The child, born in Mississippi, was given high doses of antiretroviral drugs within 30 hours of being born. A year later, the child now has detectable levels of the virus in her blood, 27 months after being taken off antiretroviral drugs, according to scientists involved with her case.

June 18, 2013 – Marking the 10th anniversary of PEPFAR, Secretary of State John Kerry announces that the millionth child has been born HIV-free due to prevention of mother-to-child transmission programs (PMTCT).

March 14, 2014 – The CDC reports on a case of likely female-to-female HIV transmission. Unlike previous announcements of other cases involving female-to-female transmission, this case excludes additional risk factors for HIV transmission.

July 24, 2017 – A 9-year-old child from South Africa is reported to have been in remission for over eight years without treatment, according to Dr. Avy Violari, who spoke at the 9th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in Paris.

November 2018 – According to PEPFAR’s website, they have “supported life-saving antiretroviral treatment (ART) for more than 14.6 million men, women and children” since 2003.

March 5, 2019 – According to a case study published in the journal Nature, a second person has sustained remission from HIV-1. The “London patient” was treated with stem cell transplants from donors with an HIV-resistant mutation. The London patient has been in remission for 18 months since he stopped taking antiretroviral drugs. The study also includes a possible third remission after stem cell transplantation, this person is referred to as the “Düsseldorf patient.”

May 2, 2019 – A study of nearly 1,000 gay male couples, where one partner with HIV took antiretroviral therapy (ART), found no new cases of transmission to the HIV-negative partner during sex without a condom. The landmark, eight-year study, published in the Lancet medical journal shows that the risk of passing on the HIV virus is eliminated with effective drugs treatment.

October 7, 2019 – Governor Gavin Newsom signs a bill making HIV prevention drugs available without a prescription in California starting on January 1, 2020. The medications covered by the new legislation are pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), which both help prevent HIV infections. California becomes the first state in the country to allow pharmacists to provide the drugs without a physician’s prescription.

November 6, 2019 – According to a study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, a team of scientists has detected a new strain of HIV. The strain is a part of the Group M version of HIV-1, the same family of virus subtypes to blame for the global HIV pandemic, according to Abbott Laboratories, which conducted the research along with the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

June 15, 2020 – A study is published in the journal JAMA Network Open showing that the life expectancy of people with HIV approaches that of people without the virus, when antiviral therapy is started early in infection. However, disparities still remain in the number of chronic health problems that people with HIV endure.

July 7, 2020 – Scientists presenting at the 23rd International AIDS Conference announce a new study that found an injection of the investigational drug cabotegravir every eight weeks was more effective at preventing HIV than daily oral pills. It is also announced that a Brazilian man might be the first person to experience long-term HIV remission after being treated with only an antiviral drug regimen – not stem cell transplantation.

November 16, 2021 – A new study finds a second patient whose body has seemingly rid itself of HIV. The international team of scientists reports in the Annals of Internal Medicine that the patient, originally from the city of Esperanza, Argentina, showed no evidence of intact HIV in large numbers of her cells, suggesting that she may have naturally achieved what they describe as a “sterilizing cure” of HIV infection. The 30-year-old woman in the new study is only the second patient who has been described as achieving this sterilizing cure without help from stem cell transplantation or other treatment.

December 20, 2021 – The US Food and Drug Administration announces that it has approved the first injectable medication for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to lower the risk of getting HIV through sex.

February 15, 2022 – A US woman becomes the third known person to go into HIV remission, and the first mixed-race woman, thanks to a transplant of stem cells from umbilical cord blood, according to research presented at a conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

December 1, 2022 – An experimental HIV vaccine, called eOD-GT8 60mer, has been found to induce broadly neutralizing antibody precursors among a small group of volunteers in a Phase 1 study. The clinical trial results, published in the journal Science, suggest that a two-dose regimen of the vaccine, given eight weeks apart, can elicit immune responses against the human immunodeficiency virus.

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May 27, 2023

Zika Virus Infection Fast Facts | CNN

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CNN
—

Here’s a look at Zika virus, an illness spread through mosquito bites that can cause birth defects and other neurological defects.

Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO) and CNN

Zika virus is a flavivirus, part of the same family as yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and dengue fever.

Zika is primarily transmitted through the bite of an infected female Aedes aegypti mosquito. It becomes infected from biting an infected human and then transmits the virus to another person. The Aedes aegypti mosquito is an aggressive species, active day and night and usually bites when it is light out. The virus can be transmitted from a pregnant woman to her fetus, through sexual contact, blood transfusion or by needle.

The FDA approved the first human trial of a Zika vaccine in June 2016. As of May 2022, there is still no available vaccine or medication.

Cases including confirmed, probable or suspected cases of Zika in US states and territories updated by the CDC.

Most people infected with Zika virus won’t have symptoms. If there are symptoms, they will last for a few days to a week.

Fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis (red eyes) are the most common symptoms. Some patients may also experience muscle pain or headaches.

Zika virus infection during pregnancy can cause microcephaly, a neurological disorder that results in babies being born with abnormally small heads. Microcephaly can cause severe developmental issues and sometimes death. A Zika infection may cause other birth defects, including eye problems, hearing loss and impaired growth. Miscarriage can also occur.

An August 2018 report published by the CDC estimates that nearly one in seven babies born to women infected with the Zika virus while pregnant had one or more health problems possibly caused by the virus, including microcephaly.

According to the CDC, there is no evidence that previous infection will affect future pregnancies.

(Sources: WHO, CDC and CNN)

1947 – The Zika virus is first discovered in a monkey by scientists studying yellow fever in Uganda’s Zika forest.

1948 – The virus is isolated from Aedes africanus mosquito samples in the Zika forest.

1964 – First active case of Zika virus found in humans. While researchers had found antibodies in the blood of people in both Uganda and in Tanzania as far back as 1952, this is the first known case of the active virus in humans. The infected man developed a pinkish rash over most of his body but reported the illness as “mild,” with none of the pain associated with dengue and chikungunya.

1960s-1980s – A small number of countries in West Africa and Asia find Zika in mosquitoes, and isolated, rare cases are reported in humans.

April-July 2007 – The first major outbreak in humans occurs on Yap Island, Federated States of Micronesia. Of the suspected 185 cases reported, 49 are confirmed, and 59 are considered probable. There are an additional 77 suspected cases. No deaths are reported.

2008 – Two American researchers studying in Senegal become ill with the Zika virus after returning to the United States. Subsequently, one of the researchers transmits the virus to his wife.

2013-2014 – A large outbreak of Zika occurs in French Polynesia, with about 32,000 suspected cases. There are also outbreaks in the Pacific Islands during this time. An uptick in cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome during the same period suggests a possible link between the Zika virus and the rare neurological syndrome. However, it was not proven because the islands were also experiencing an outbreak of dengue fever at the time.

March 2015 – Brazil alerts the WHO to an illness with skin rash that is present in the northeastern region of the country. From February 2015 to April 29, 2015, nearly 7,000 cases of illness with a skin rash are reported. Later in the month, Brazil provides additional information to WHO on the illnesses.

April 29, 2015 – A state laboratory in Brazil informs the WHO that preliminary samples have tested positive for the Zika virus.

May 7, 2015 – The outbreak of the Zika virus in Brazil prompts the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to issue an epidemiological alert.

October 30, 2015 – Brazil reports an increase in the cases of microcephaly, babies born with abnormally small heads: 54 cases between August and October 30.

November 11, 2015 – Brazil declares a national public health emergency as the number of newborns with microcephaly continues to rise.

November 27, 2015 – Brazil reports it is examining 739 cases of microcephaly.

November 28, 2015 – Brazil reports three deaths from Zika infection: two adults and one newborn.

January 15 and 22, 2016 – The CDC advises all pregnant women or those trying to become pregnant to postpone travel or consult their physicians prior to traveling to any of the countries where Zika is active.

February 2016 – The CDC reports Zika virus in brain tissue samples from two Brazilian babies who died within a day of birth, as well as in fetal tissue from two miscarriages providing the first proof of a potential connection between Zika and the rising number of birth defects, stillbirths and miscarriages in mothers infected with the virus.

February 1, 2016 – The WHO declares Zika a Public Health Emergency of International Concern due to the increase of neurological disorders, such as microcephaly, in areas of French Polynesia and Brazil.

February 8, 2016 – The CDC elevates its Emergency Operations Center for Zika to Level 1, the highest level of response at the CDC.

February 26, 2016 – Amid indications that the mosquito-borne Zika virus is causing microcephaly in newborns, the CDC advises pregnant women to “consider not going” to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The CDC later strengthens the advisory, telling pregnant women, “Do not go to the Olympics.”

March 4, 2016 – The US Olympic Committee announces the formation of an infectious disease advisory group to help the USOC establish “best practices regarding the mitigation, assessment and management of infectious disease, paying particular attention to how issues may affect athletes and staff participating in the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

April 13, 2016 – During a press briefing, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said, “It is now clear the CDC has concluded that Zika does cause microcephaly. This confirmation is based on a thorough review of the best scientific evidence conducted by CDC and other experts in maternal and fetal health and mosquito-borne diseases.”

May 27, 2016 – More than 100 prominent doctors and scientists sign an open letter to WHO Director General Margaret Chan, calling for the summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro to be postponed or moved “in the name of public health” due to the widening Zika outbreak in Brazil.

July 8, 2016 – Health officials in Utah report the first Zika-related death in the continental United States.

August 1, 2016 – Pregnant women and their partners are advised by the CDC not to visit the Miami neighborhood of Wynwood as four cases of the disease have been reported in the small community and local mosquitoes are believed to be spreading the infection.

September 19, 2016 – The CDC announces that it has successfully reduced the population of Zika-carrying mosquitoes in Wynwood and lifts its advisory against travel to the community.

November 18, 2016 – The WHO declares that the Zika virus outbreak is no longer a public health emergency, shifting the focus to long-term plans to research the disease and birth defects linked to the virus.

November 28, 2016 – Health officials announce Texas has become the second state in the continental United States to confirm a locally transmitted case of Zika virus.

September 29, 2017 – The CDC deactivates its emergency response for Zika virus, which was activated in January 2016.

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May 26, 2023

Avian Flu Fast Facts | CNN

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CNN
—

Here’s a look at avian flu.

Avian influenza, also called avian flu or bird flu, is an illness that usually affects only birds.

There are many different strains of avian flu: 16 H subtypes and 9 N subtypes. Only those labeled H5, H7 and H10 have caused deaths in humans.

The most commonly seen and most deadly form of the virus is called “Influenza A (H5N1),” or the “H5N1 virus.”

Most cases of human bird flu infections are due to contact with infected poultry or surfaces that are contaminated with infected bird excretions: saliva, nasal secretions or feces.

Symptoms of avian flu include fever, cough, sore throat and sometimes severe respiratory diseases and pneumonia.

The CDC recommends oral oseltamivir (brand name: Tamiflu), inhaled zanamivir (brand name: Relenza) and intravenous permavir (brand name: Rapivab) for the treatment of human illness associated with avian flu.

The mortality rate is close to 60% for infected humans.

Early 1900s –The avian flu is first identified in Italy.

1961 – The H5N1 strain is isolated in birds in South Africa.

December 1983 – Chickens in Pennsylvania and Virginia are exposed to the avian flu and more than five million birds are killed to stop the disease from spreading.

1997 – Eighteen people are infected by the H5N1 strain in Hong Kong, six die. These are the first documented cases of human infection. Hong Kong destroys its entire poultry population, 1.5 million birds.

1999 – Two children in Hong Kong are infected by the H9N2 strain.

February 2003 – Eighty-four people in the Netherlands are affected by the H7N7 strain of the virus, one dies.

February 7, 2004 – Twelve thousand chickens are killed in Kent County, Delaware, after they are found to be infected with the H7 virus.

October 7, 2005 – The avian flu reaches Europe. Romanian officials quarantine a village of about 30 people after three dead ducks there test positive for bird flu.

November 12, 2005 – A one-year-old boy in Thailand tests positive for the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

November 16, 2005 – The World Health Organization confirms two human cases of bird flu in China, including a female poultry worker who died from the H5N1 strain.

November 17, 2005 – Two deaths are confirmed in Indonesia from the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

January 1, 2006 – A Turkish teenager dies of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza in Istanbul, and later that week, two of his sisters die.

January 17, 2006 – A 15-year-old girl from northern Iraq dies after contracting bird flu.

February 20, 2006 – Vietnam becomes the first country to successfully contain the disease. A country is considered disease-free when no new cases are reported in 21 days.

March 12, 2006 – Officials in Cameroon confirm cases of the H5N1 strain. The avian flu has now reached four African countries.

March 13, 2006 – The avian flu is confirmed by officials in Myanmar.

May 11, 2006 – Djibouti announces its first cases of H5N1 – several birds and one human.

December 20, 2011 – The US Department of Health and Human Services releases a statement saying that the government is urging scientific journals to omit details from research they intend to publish on the transfer of H5N1 among mammals. There is concern that the information could be misused by terrorists.

July 31, 2012 – Scientists announce that H3N8, a new strain of avian flu, caused the death of more than 160 baby seals in New England in 2011.

March 31, 2013 – Chinese authorities report the first human cases of infection of avian flu H7N9 to the World Health Organization. H7N9 has not previously been detected in humans.

December 6, 2013 – A 73-year-old woman infected with H10N8 dies in China, the first human fatality from this strain.

January 8, 2014 – Canadian health officials confirm that a resident from Alberta has died from H5N1 avian flu, the first case of the virus in North America. It is also the first case of H5N1 infection ever imported by a traveler into a country where the virus is not present in poultry.

April 20, 2015 – Officials say more than five million hens will be euthanized after bird flu was detected at a commercial laying facility in northwest Iowa. According to the US Department of Agriculture, close to eight million cases of bird flu have been detected in 13 states since December. Health officials say there is little to no risk for transmission to humans with respect to H5N2. No human infections with the virus have ever been detected.

January 15, 2016 – The US Department of Agriculture confirms that a commercial turkey farm in Dubois County, Indiana, has tested positive for the H7N8 strain of avian influenza.

January 24, 2017 – Britain’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs releases a statement confirming that a case of H5N8 avian flu has been detected in a flock of farmed breeding pheasants in Preston, UK. The flock is estimated to contain around 10,000 birds. The statement adds that a number of those birds have died, and the remaining live birds at the premises are being “humanely” killed because of the disease.

February 12, 2017 – A number of provinces in China have shut down their live poultry markets to prevent the spread of avian flu after a surge in the number of infections from the H7N9 strain. At least six provinces have reported human cases of H7N9 influenza this year, according to Chinese state media, Xinhua.

March 5-7, 2017 – The USDA confirms that a commercial chicken farm in Tennessee has tested positive for the H7N9 strain of avian flu, but says it is genetically different from the H7N9 lineage out of China. The 73,500-bird flock in Lincoln County will be euthanized, according to Tyson Foods.

February 14, 2018 – Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection announces that a 68-year-old woman has been treated for the H7N4 strain. This is the first case of this strain in a human.

June 5, 2019 – Since 2013 there have been 1,568 confirmed human cases and 616 deaths worldwide from the H7N9 strain of avian flu, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

December 2019 – The United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs confirms that a case of H5N1 avian flu has been detected at a poultry farm in Suffolk. 27,000 birds are humanely killed because of the disease.

April 9, 2020 – The USDA confirms that a commercial turkey flock in Chesterfield County, South Carolina has tested positive for the H7N3 strain of avian flu.

January 2021 – India culls tens of thousands of poultry birds after avian influenza is detected in ducks, crows and wild geese in at least a dozen locations across the country.

February 18, 2021 – Russian authorities notify WHO that they have detected H5N8 in humans. “If confirmed, this would be the first time H5N8 has infected people,” a WHO Europe spokesperson says in a statement.

June 1, 2021 – China’s National Health Commission announces the first human case of H10N3.

February 2022 – The USDA confirms that wild birds and domestic poultry in the United States have tested positive for the H5N1 strain of avian flu. By May 17, 2023, the CDC reports there are 47 states with poultry outbreaks.

April 26, 2022 – China’s National Health Commission announces the first human case of H3N8.

April 28, 2022 – The CDC announces a case of H5 bird flu has been confirmed in a man in Colorado.

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May 25, 2023

Vaccines Fast Facts | CNN

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CNN
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Here’s a look at information and statistics concerning vaccines in the United States. For vaccines related to coronavirus, see Coronavirus Outbreak Timeline Fast Facts.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides vaccine recommendations by age, as well as by disease.

For more than 100 years, there has been public discord regarding vaccines based on issues like individual rights, religious freedoms, distrust of government and the effects that vaccines may have on the health of children.

Exemptions to vaccines fall into three general categories: medical, religious and philosophical.

As of May 25, 2022, 44 states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation allowing religious exemptions from vaccines, and 15 states allow philosophical (non-spiritual) exemptions.

1796 – Edward Jenner develops the smallpox vaccine, the world’s first successful vaccine.

1855 – Massachusetts mandates that school children are to be vaccinated (only the smallpox vaccine is available at the time).

February 20, 1905 – In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the US Supreme Court upholds the State’s right to compel immunizing against smallpox.

November 13, 1922 – The US Supreme Court denies any constitutional violation in Zucht v. King in which Rosalyn Zucht believes that requiring vaccines violates her right to liberty without due process. The High Court opines that city ordinances that require vaccinations for children to attend school are a “discretion required for the protection of the public health.”

1952 – Dr. Jonas Salk and his team develop a vaccine for polio. A nationwide trial leads to the vaccine being declared in 1955 to be safe and effective.

1963 – The first measles vaccine is released. In 2000, the CDC declares the US has achieved measles elimination, defined as “the absence of continuous disease transmission for 12 months or more in a specific geographic area.” While the US has maintained measles elimination since, there are occasional outbreaks.

1986 – Congress passes the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. This coordinates vaccine activities across several government agencies to monitor vaccine safety, requires vaccine information statements are provided to those receiving vaccines, and creates the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to compensate those injured by vaccines on a “no fault” basis.

March 19, 1992 – Rolling Stone publishes an article by Tom Curtis, “The Origin of AIDS,” which presents a theory that ties HIV/AIDS to polio vaccines. Curtis writes that in the late 1950s, during a vaccination campaign in Africa, at least 325,000 people were immunized with a contaminated polio vaccine. The article alleges that the vaccine may have been contaminated with a monkey virus and is the cause of the human immunodeficiency virus, later known as HIV/AIDS.

August 10, 1993 – Congress passes the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act which creates the Vaccines for Children Program, providing qualified children free vaccines.

December 9, 1993 – Rolling Stone publishes an update to the Curtis article, clarifying that his theory was not fact, and Rolling Stone did not mean to suggest there was any scientific proof to support it, and the magazine regrets any damage caused by the article.

1998 – British researcher Andrew Wakefield and 12 other authors publish a paper stating they had evidence that linked the vaccination for Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) to autism. They claim they discovered the measles virus in the digestive systems of autistic children who were given the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The publication leads to a widespread increase in the number of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children for fear of its link to autism.

2004 – Co-authors of the Wakefield study begin removing their names from the article when they discover Wakefield had been paid by lawyers representing parents who planned to sue vaccine manufacturers.

May 14, 2004 – The Institute of Medicine releases a report “rejecting a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.”

February 2010 – The Lancet, the British medical journal that published Wakefield’s study, officially retracts the article. Britain also revokes Wakefield’s medical license.

2011 – Investigative reporter Brian Deer writes a series of articles in the BMJ exposing Wakefield’s fraud. The articles state that he used distorted data and falsified medical histories of children that may have led to an unfounded relationship between vaccines and the development of autism.

2011 – The US Public Health Service finds that 63% of parents who refuse and delay vaccines do so for fear their children could have serious side effects.

June 17, 2014 – After analyzing 10 studies, all of which looked at whether there was a link between vaccines and autism and involved a total of over one million children, the University of Sydney publishes a report saying there is no correlation between vaccinations and the development of autism.

February 2015 – Advocacy group Autism Speaks releases a statement, “Over the last two decades, extensive research has asked whether there is any link between childhood vaccinations and autism. The results of this research are clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. We urge that all children be fully vaccinated.

August 23, 2018 – A study published in the American Journal of Public Health finds that Twitter accounts run by automated bots and Russian trolls masqueraded as legitimate users engaging in online vaccine debates. The bots and trolls posted a variety of anti-, pro- and neutral tweets and directly confronted vaccine skeptics, which “legitimize” the vaccine debate, according to the researchers.

October 11, 2018 – Two reports published by the CDC find that vaccine exemption rates and the percentage of unvaccinated children are on the rise.

January 2019 – The World Health Organization names vaccine hesitancy as one of 10 threats to global health in 2019.

September 4, 2019 – Facebook announces that educational pop-up windows will appear on the social media platforms when a user searches for vaccine-related content, visits vaccine-related Facebook groups and pages, or taps a vaccine-related hashtag on Instagram

December 19, 2019 – The US Food and Drug administration announces the approval of a vaccine for the prevention of the Ebola virus for the first time in the United States. The vaccine, Ervebo, was developed by Merck and protects against Ebola virus disease caused by Zaire ebolavirus in people 18 and older.

December 27, 2019 – A study published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open finds that a single dose of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may be just as effective as two or three doses at preventing cancer-causing HPV infection.

February 3, 2020 – The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announces that a clinical trial for an HIV vaccine has been discontinued since the vaccine was not found to prevent infections of human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS.

May 3, 2023 – The US FDA approves, Arexvy, the first vaccine to protect against respiratory syncytial virus or RSV. It is a single shot for adults 60 or older.

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May 24, 2023

Sleep apnea raises risk of long Covid by up to 75% for some, study says | CNN

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CNN
—

Adults who have obstructive sleep apnea have up to an 75% increased risk, on average, of developing long Covid after a SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with people without sleep apnea, a new study found.

Women with obstructive sleep apnea had up to an 89% increased risk, while men had a 59% higher risk, according to the analysis of electronic health data on nearly 1.8 million people.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a potentially dangerous disorder in which breathing stops for about 10 seconds multiple times during the night due to a blockage of the airways by heavy or relaxed soft tissues in the mouth and throat.

A second analysis of medical records of a smaller group of 330,000 adults found the risk to be only 12%, according to the study, which is part of RECOVER, or Researching Covid to Enhance Recovery. RECOVER is a National Institutes of Health initiative dedicated to understanding why some people develop long Covid and how best to detect, treat, and prevent the condition.

Why the huge difference in numbers? People in the larger study had additional health concerns, or comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, said senior study author Lorna Thorpe, co-lead of the RECOVER Clinical Science Core at NYU Langone Health.

“The range of 12% to 75% is likely due to a combination of different study populations and different levels of comorbidities, but also different definitions of long Covid,” she said. “We didn’t even have a diagnostic code for long Covid until October 2021.

“I believe the risk is likely to be in the middle, but we will need additional studies to tease that out,” added Thorpe, a professor and director of the division of epidemiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

A third analysis of medical records of 102,000 children with sleep apnea found no correlation between sleep apnea and long Covid after the various confounding health conditions were factored out, “which, of course, is great news,” Thorpe said.

“By using three very large networks of electronic health records, we were able to do this study three times, which is one of the strengths of the research,” she added. “This study is the first collaboration of this focus and scale to find that adults with sleep apnea are at greater risk for long Covid.”

This is an “important study” on long Covid, said Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy, a principal investigator of the University of Arizona Health Sciences RECOVER Adult Study and professor of medicine.

“Research needs to be done in a prospective study to verify this association, and if found to be true these findings have implications for treatment of long Covid,” said Parthasarathy, who was not involved in the study.

“It is important to note that some of the symptoms of long Covid such as fatigue may be related to obstructive sleep apnea, and that the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea may improve such long Covid-related symptoms,” he added.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Sleep, is one of a several studies released since Congress allocated $1.15 billion to NIH in January 2021, to study the long-term effects of Covid over a four-year period. To date, the agency says it has used about $811 million to fund research.

Researchers wanted to investigate the role of sleep apnea in long Covid due to the well-known association between the condition and poorer outcomes after a Covid infection.

“People with sleep apnea are at higher risk for a more severe case of Covid-19, admission to intensive care at the hospital and for mortality,” Thorpe said.

“Obstructive sleep apnea can result in increased inflammation, potentially disrupted sleep leading to an increased propensity to develop infections and reduced immunity,” said Dr. Bhanu Prakash Kolla, a sleep medicine specialist in the Center for Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

“This could potentially explain the pathway by which obstructive sleep apnea leads to an increased risk of having Covid and also … (long Covid),” said Kolla, who was not involved in the study.

Sleep apnea is an underdiagnosed condition regardless of gender, said the University of Arizona’s Parthasarathy.

“It is conservatively estimated that 80% of patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are not diagnosed,” he said. In addition, “an assumption with these analyses is that patients with OSA are likely to be treated. However, nearly half of them are not using the treatment.”

Why would women have up to an 89% higher risk compared with 59% in men? The study did not address that issue.

However, “one can postulate this difference may be based on what we know about sex differences in sleep and immune responses,” said Dr. Phyllis Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Zee, who was not involved with the new research, coauthored one of the first published studies on the link between sleep apnea and serious Covid infection.

“Women typically have stronger immune responses to viral infections, and thus also vulnerability for post-infection inflammation,” Zee said. “Women in general have more insomnia and with long Covid tend to present with fatigue and insomnia symptoms, which are also common symptoms of long Covid.”

Another reason could be that sleep apnea has historically been considered a male disease, Thorpe said, which could mean that by the time a woman is diagnosed her apnea is more advanced.

“It could be that the women who are documented in electronic health records have more severe sleep apnea because physicians more often look for sleep apnea among men,” she said.

As scientists continue to learn more about long Covid, further information will become available, Thorpe said. In the meantime, people who have sleep apnea — or who snore, snort and stop breathing at night, which are all signs of the condition — should be exceedingly careful when they contact Covid.

“People with sleep apnea who get infected with Covid should seek early treatment and consider getting Paxlovid, the oral medication prescribed to reduce risk of severe outcomes,” Thorpe said. “They should also keep up with their vaccinations to lower the risk of infection in the first place.”

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May 15, 2023

Covid-19 is no longer a public health emergency, but others remain | CNN

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CNN
—

The Covid-19 pandemic hit a major milestone this month as public health emergency declarations were ended by both the United States government and the World Health Organization. Emergency declarations for mpox also recently ended.

This doesn’t mean Covid-19 and mpox are no longer of concern, but it does mark the end of the availability of certain logistical capabilities to manage them.

Still, other critical health challenges were identified as health emergencies years before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and continue to be so: the opioid crisis in the US and the global spread of poliovirus.

Some public health concerns can be serious health threats without a formal emergency declaration, said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It largely boils down to the logistics of government operations.

“When there’s an unusual situation that requires multiple parts of an agency or multiple parts of the government or multiple parts of society to come together and coordinate, collaborate and work efficiently, then an emergency declaration can be a useful tool,” said Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, an organization focused on global epidemic prevention and cardiovascular health.

“Sometimes, an emergency is declared to make the point that it’s a big problem, to get people’s attention. Sometimes, an emergency is declared to get things done because that’s the only way you can bring certain governmental capacities to bear.”

According to WHO, a public health emergency of international concern is “an extraordinary event” that poses public health risk through the international spread of disease.

It creates an agreement between countries to abide by WHO’s recommendations for managing the emergency, often requiring a “coordinated international response.” Each country, in turn, declares its own public health emergency – declarations that carry legal weight. Countries use them to marshal resources and waive rules in order to ease a crisis.

In the US, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services can declare a public health emergency for diseases or disorders that pose a threat, including “significant outbreaks” of an infectious disease, bioterrorist attacks or otherwise.

This triggers the availability of a set of resources and actions for the federal government, such as additional funds and data and reporting requirements.

Emergency declarations typically last up to 90 days, with formal renewal required as necessary every three months after that.

The opioid crisis was determined to be a public health emergency in October 2017, during the Trump administration, driven by the rising rates of opioid-related deaths and opioid use disorder.

The declaration has been renewed for more than five years, most recently at the end of March.

According to the CDC, the opioid epidemic started in 1999 with a rise in prescription opioid overdose deaths. Deaths started to increase precipitously as synthetic opioids – particularly fentanyl – started to take over in 2013.

In 2021, overdose deaths reached record levels in the US, and about three-quarters – more than 80,000 deaths – involved opioids.

Within the first year of the opioid emergency declaration, HHS used expanded authorities to field a survey about treatment for opioid use disorder among providers and to expedite research on the topic.

Public health emergencies are also declared to help with recovery after natural disasters, most recently for severe storms that hit Mississippi in March.

However, the Government Accountability Office considers both federal management of the public health emergency system and efforts to combat drug misuse to be “high-risk” areas that are vulnerable or in need of broad reform.

In a recent report, the federal watchdog group said that it has found “persistent deficiencies in HHS’s leadership role preparing for and responding to public health emergencies” and no demonstrated progress in federal agencies’ actions to address drug misuse.

WHO has considered poliovirus a public health emergency of international concern since 2014.

A committee formed to address the emergency reviewed the most recent data on cases and spread this month and voted unanimously that ongoing risks merited an extension of the emergency declaration, which the director-general formalized Friday.

The committee was “encouraged by reported progress” but says that risks remain high for factors including weak vaccination rates that could have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

WHO identified seven counties with potential risk for international spread. And the US is among a group of 37 countries with recently detected cases.

In July, a polio case identified in New York became the first in the US in nearly a decade. The identified case, along with several positive wastewater tests in nearby communities, met WHO criteria to consider the US a country with circulating poliovirus.

Experts warned that it could just be the “tip of the iceberg,” with hundreds of cases spreading silently.

Childhood vaccination rates in the US dropped during the Covid-19 pandemic. A CDC report found that about 93% of kindergarteners enrolled in the 2021-22 school year got the required vaccines, including measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis (DTaP); and polio. Coverage fell for the second year in a row amid the pandemic, from about 94% the previous year and below the federal target of 95%.

While no longer under a formal emergency declaration, Covid-19 continues to be part of the “landscape of health threats,” Frieden said.

But the efficiency and coordination that the formal declaration helps facilitate should always be the goal.

“I think there are really important lessons from Covid, including the need to have a much more resilient public health system so that we can find problems quickly and implement effective solutions quickly,” Frieden said.

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May 13, 2023

Mpox in the United States Fast Facts | CNN

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Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include the WHO’s updated recommendation for what the virus should be called.

CNN
—

Here’s a look at mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, in the United States. In 2022, an outbreak was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO). The virus originated in Africa and is the cousin of the smallpox virus.

In November 2022, WHO renames the monkeypox virus as mpox after working with International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) to rename the the virus using non-stigmatizing, non-offensive social and cultural nomenclature.

(Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

Mpox is a poxvirus. It generally causes pimple- or blister-like lesions and flu-like symptoms such as fever. The disease is rarely fatal.

Mpox spreads through close contact. This includes direct physical contact with lesions as well as “respiratory secretions” shared through face-to-face interaction and touching objects that have been contaminated by mpox lesions or fluids. The virus may also pass to a fetus through the placenta.

Anyone can become ill from mpox, but the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that more than 99% of mpox cases in the United States in the 2022 outbreak have been among men who have sex with men. However, mpox is not generally considered a sexually transmitted disease.

Mpox is usually found in West and Central Africa, but additional cases have been seen in Europe, including the United Kingdom, and other parts of the world in recent years. Those cases are typically linked to international travel or imported animals infected with the poxvirus.

CDC Mpox Map and Case Count

WHO Situation Reports

1958 – Mpox is discovered when monkeys kept for research cause two outbreaks in Copenhagen, Denmark.

1970 – The first human case is recorded in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

2003 – An outbreak in the United States is linked to infected pet prairie dogs imported from Ghana and results in more than 80 cases.

July 16, 2021 – The CDC and local health officials in Dallas announce they are investigating a case of mpox in a traveler from Nigeria. “The individual is a City of Dallas resident who traveled from Nigeria to Dallas, arriving at Love Field airport on July 9, 2021. The person is hospitalized in Dallas and is in stable condition,” the Dallas County Department of Health and Human Services says in a statement.

May 17, 2022 – The first confirmed US case of mpox in the 2022 outbreak is reported to the CDC in a traveler who returned to Massachusetts from Canada.

May 19, 2022 – WHO reports that death rates of the outbreak have been between 3% and 6%.

May 23, 2022 – The CDC announces the release of mpox vaccine doses from the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile for “high-risk people.” In the United States, the two-dose Jynneos vaccine is licensed to prevent smallpox and specifically to prevent mpox.

May 26, 2022 – CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announces that the United States is distributing the vaccine to states with reported cases and recommends vaccination for people at highest risk of infection due to direct contact with someone who has mpox.

June 22, 2022 – The CDC announces a partnership with five commercial laboratories to ramp up testing capacity in the United States.

June 23, 2022 – New York City launches the first mpox vaccination clinic in the United States.

June 28, 2022 – The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Biden administration announce an enhanced vaccination strategy and report that more than 9,000 doses of vaccine have been distributed to date.

July 22, 2022 – Two American children contract mpox – a first in the United States. According to the CDC, the two cases are unrelated.

July 23, 2022 – WHO declares mpox a public health emergency of international concern, “an extraordinary event that may constitute a public health risk to other countries through international spread of disease and may require an international coordinated response.”

July 27, 2022 – After weeks of mpox vaccines being in limited supply, more than 786,000 additional doses are made available in the United States, according to HHS.

July 29, 2022 – New York declares a state disaster emergency in response to the mpox outbreak.

August 1, 2022 – California and Illinois declare states of emergency. California has reported more than 800 cases, while Illinois has had more than 500, according to data from the CDC.

August 2, 2022 – An mpox response team is created by the Biden administration. President Joe Biden names Robert Fenton from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as the White House national mpox response coordinator.

August 2, 2022 – A report from Spain’s National Institute for Microbiology indicates two men, ages 31 and 44, who died from mpox in unrelated cases had both developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain, which can be triggered by viral infections. Encephalitis is a very rare condition known to be associated with mpox. It has been reported in people with mpox in West Africa and in a patient in the United States in 2003 during the small outbreak linked to imported prairie dogs.

August 4, 2022 – The Biden administration declares the mpox outbreak a national public health emergency.

August 5, 2022 – A report published by the CDC finds that 94% of cases were among men who had recent sexual or close intimate contact with another man. Further, 54% of cases were among Black Americans and Latinos.

August 9, 2022 – In an effort to stretch the limited supply of the Jynneos mpox vaccine, federal health officials authorize administering smaller doses using a different method of injection. The new injection strategy allows health-care providers to give shallow injections intradermally, in between layers of the skin, with one-fifth the standard dose size instead of subcutaneously, into the fatty layer below the skin, with the larger dose.

August 18, 2022 – The White House announces the acceleration of the HHS vaccine distribution timeline, with an additional 1.8 million doses of the Jynneos vaccine being made available. Additional vaccines will be distributed to communities hosting large LGBTQI+ events.

August 19, 2022 – Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle, declares mpox a public health emergency, with more than 270 recorded cases.

September 12, 2022 – The first US death due to mpox is confirmed in Los Angeles County, California.

May 11, 2023 – WHO declares the mpox outbreak is no longer a global health emergency.

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May 9, 2023

Covid-19 Pandemic Timeline Fast Facts | CNN

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CNN
—

Here’s a look at the coronavirus outbreak, declared a worldwide pandemic by the World Health Organization. The coronavirus, called Covid-19 by WHO, originated in China and is the cousin of the SARS virus.

Coronaviruses are a large group of viruses that are common among animals. The viruses can make people sick, usually with a mild to moderate upper respiratory tract illness, similar to a common cold. Coronavirus symptoms include a runny nose, cough, sore throat, possibly a headache and maybe a fever, which can last for a couple of days.

WHO Situation Reports

Coronavirus Map

CNN’s early reporting on the coronavirus

December 31, 2019 – Cases of pneumonia detected in Wuhan, China, are first reported to WHO. During this reported period, the virus is unknown. The cases occur between December 12 and December 29, according to Wuhan Municipal Health.

January 1, 2020 – Chinese health authorities close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after it is discovered that wild animals sold there may be the source of the virus.

January 5, 2020 – China announces that the unknown pneumonia cases in Wuhan are not SARS or MERS. In a statement, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission says a retrospective probe into the outbreak has been initiated.

January 7, 2020 – Chinese authorities confirm that they have identified the virus as a novel coronavirus, initially named 2019-nCoV by WHO.

January 11, 2020 – The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announces the first death caused by the coronavirus. A 61-year-old man, exposed to the virus at the seafood market, died on January 9 after respiratory failure caused by severe pneumonia.

January 17, 2020 – Chinese health officials confirm that a second person has died in China. The United States responds to the outbreak by implementing screenings for symptoms at airports in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

January 20, 2020 – China reports 139 new cases of the sickness, including a third death. On the same day, WHO’s first situation report confirms cases in Japan, South Korea and Thailand.

January 20, 2020 – The National Institutes of Health announces that it is working on a vaccine against the coronavirus. “The NIH is in the process of taking the first steps towards the development of a vaccine,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

January 21, 2020 – Officials in Washington state confirm the first case on US soil.

January 23, 2020 – At an emergency committee, WHO says that the coronavirus does not yet constitute a public health emergency of international concern.

January 23, 2020 – The Beijing Culture and Tourism Bureau cancels all large-scale Lunar New Year celebrations in an effort to contain the growing spread of coronavirus. On the same day, Chinese authorities enforce a partial lockdown of transport in and out of Wuhan. Authorities in the nearby cities of Huanggang and Ezhou Huanggang announce a series of similar measures.

January 28, 2020 – Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom in Beijing. At the meeting, Xi and WHO agree to send a team of international experts, including US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff, to China to investigate the coronavirus outbreak.

January 29, 2020 – The White House announces the formation of a new task force that will help monitor and contain the spread of the virus, and ensure Americans have accurate and up-to-date health and travel information, it says.

January 30, 2020 – The United States reports its first confirmed case of person-to-person transmission of the coronavirus. On the same day, WHO determines that the outbreak constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

January 31, 2020 – The Donald Trump administration announces it will deny entry to foreign nationals who have traveled in China in the last 14 days.

February 2, 2020 – A man in the Philippines dies from the coronavirus – the first time a death has been reported outside mainland China since the outbreak began.

February 3, 2020 – China’s Foreign Ministry accuses the US government of inappropriately reacting to the outbreak and spreading fear by enforcing travel restrictions.

February 4, 2020 – The Japanese Health Ministry announces that ten people aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship moored in Yokohama Bay are confirmed to have the coronavirus. The ship, which is carrying more than 3,700 people, is placed under quarantine scheduled to end on February 19.

February 6, 2020 – First Covid-19 death in the United States: A person in California’s Santa Clara County dies of coronavirus, but the link is not confirmed until April 21.

February 7, 2020 – Li Wenliang, a Wuhan doctor who was targeted by police for trying to sound the alarm on a “SARS-like” virus in December, dies of the coronavirus. Following news of Li’s death, the topics “Wuhan government owes Dr. Li Wenliang an apology,” and “We want freedom of speech,” trend on China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo, before disappearing from the heavily censored platform.

February 8, 2020 – The US Embassy in Beijing confirms that a 60-year-old US national died in Wuhan on February 6, marking the first confirmed death of a foreigner.

February 10, 2020 – Xi inspects efforts to contain the coronavirus in Beijing, the first time he has appeared on the front lines of the fight against the outbreak. On the same day, a team of international experts from WHO arrive in China to assist with containing the coronavirus outbreak.

February 10, 2020 – The Anthem of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, sets sail from Bayonne, New Jersey, after a coronavirus scare had kept it docked and its passengers waiting for days.

February 11, 2020 – WHO names the coronavirus Covid-19.

February 13, 2020 – China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency announces that Shanghai mayor Ying Yong will be replacing Jiang Chaoliang amid the outbreak. Wuhan Communist Party chief Ma Guoqiang has also been replaced by Wang Zhonglin, party chief of Jinan city in Shandong province, according to Xinhua.

February 14, 2020 – A Chinese tourist who tested positive for the virus dies in France, becoming the first person to die in the outbreak in Europe. On the same day, Egypt announces its first case of coronavirus, marking the first case in Africa.

February 15, 2020 – The official Communist Party journal Qiushi publishes the transcript of a speech made on February 3 by Xi in which he “issued requirements for the prevention and control of the new coronavirus” on January 7, revealing Xi knew about and was directing the response to the virus on almost two weeks before he commented on it publicly.

February 17, 2020 – A second person in California’s Santa Clara County dies of coronavirus, but the link is not confirmed until April 21.

February 18, 2020 – Xi says in a phone call with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that China’s measures to prevent and control the epidemic “are achieving visible progress,” according to state news Xinhua.

February 21, 2020 – The CDC changes criteria for counting confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in the United States and begins tracking two separate and distinct groups: those repatriated by the US Department of State and those identified by the US public health network.

February 25, 2020 – The NIH announces that a clinical trial to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the antiviral drug remdesivir in adults diagnosed with coronavirus has started at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. The first participant is an American who was evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan.

February 25, 2020 – In an effort to contain the largest outbreak in Europe, Italy’s Lombardy region press office issues a list of towns and villages that are in complete lockdown. Around 100,000 people are affected by the travel restrictions.

February 26, 2020 – CDC officials say that a California patient being treated for novel coronavirus is the first US case of unknown origin. The patient, who didn’t have any relevant travel history nor exposure to another known patient, is the first possible US case of “community spread.”

February 26, 2020 – Trump places Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the US government response to the novel coronavirus, amid growing criticism of the White House’s handling of the outbreak.

February 29, 2020 – A patient dies of coronavirus in Washington state. For almost two months, this is considered the first death due to the virus in the United States, until autopsy results announced April 21 reveal two earlier deaths in California.

March 3, 2020 – The Federal Reserve slashes interest rates by half a percentage point in an attempt to give the US economy a jolt in the face of concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. It is the first unscheduled, emergency rate cut since 2008, and it also marks the biggest one-time cut since then.

March 3, 2020 – Officials announce that Iran will temporarily release 54,000 people from prisons and deploy hundreds of thousands of health workers as officials announced a slew of measures to contain the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak outside China. It is also announced that 23 members of Iran’s parliament tested positive for the virus.

March 4, 2020 – The CDC formally removes earlier restrictions that limited coronavirus testing of the general public to people in the hospital, unless they had close contact with confirmed coronavirus cases. According to the CDC, clinicians should now “use their judgment to determine if a patient has signs and symptoms compatible with COVID-19 and whether the patient should be tested.”

March 8, 2020 – Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte signs a decree placing travel restrictions on the entire Lombardy region and 14 other provinces, restricting the movements of more than 10 million people in the northern part of the country.

March 9, 2020 – Conte announces that the whole country of Italy is on lockdown.

March 11, 2020 – WHO declares the novel coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic. WHO says the outbreak is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus. In an Oval Office address, Trump announces that he is restricting travel from Europe to the United States for 30 days in an attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus. The ban, which applies to the 26 countries in the Schengen Area, applies only to foreign nationals and not American citizens and permanent residents who’d be screened before entering the country.

March 13, 2020 – Trump declares a national emergency to free up $50 billion in federal resources to combat coronavirus.

March 18, 2020 – Trump signs into law a coronavirus relief package that includes provisions for free testing for Covid-19 and paid emergency leave.

March 19, 2020 – At a news conference, officials from China’s National Health Commission report no new locally transmitted coronavirus cases for the first time since the pandemic began.

March 23, 2020 – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres calls for an immediate global ceasefire amid the pandemic to fight “the common enemy.”

March 24, 2020 – Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach agree to postpone the Olympics until 2021 amid the outbreak.

March 25, 2020 – The White House and Senate leaders reach an agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus deal to offset the economic damage of coronavirus, producing one of the most expensive and far-reaching measures in the history of Congress.

March 27, 2020 – Trump signs the stimulus package into law.

April 2, 2020 – According to the Department of Labor, 6.6 million US workers file for their first week of unemployment benefits in the week ending March 28, the highest number of initial claims in history. Globally, the total number of coronavirus cases surpasses 1 million, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tally.

April 3, 2020 – Trump says his administration is now recommending Americans wear “non-medical cloth” face coverings, a reversal of previous guidance that suggested masks were unnecessary for people who weren’t sick.

April 8, 2020 – China reopens Wuhan after a 76-day lockdown.

April 14, 2020 – Trump announces he is halting funding to WHO while a review is conducted, saying the review will cover WHO’s “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus.”

April 20, 2020 – Chilean health officials announce that Chile will begin issuing the world’s first digital immunity cards to people who have recovered from coronavirus, saying the cards will help identify individuals who no longer pose a health risk to others.

April 21, 2020 – California’s Santa Clara County announces autopsy results that show two Californians died of novel coronavirus in early and mid-February – up to three weeks before the previously known first US death from the virus.

April 28, 2020 – The United States passes one million confirmed cases of the virus, according to Johns Hopkins.

May 1, 2020 – The US Food and Drug Administration issues an emergency-use authorization for remdesivir in hospitalized patients with severe Covid-19. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn says remdesivir is the first authorized therapy drug for Covid-19.

May 4, 2020 – During a virtual pledging conference co-hosted by the European Union, world leaders pledge a total of $8 billion for the development and deployment of diagnostics, treatments and vaccines against the novel coronavirus.

May 11, 2020 – Trump and his administration announce that the federal government is sending $11 billion to states to expand coronavirus testing capabilities. The relief package signed on April 24 includes $25 billion for testing, with $11 billion for states, localities, territories and tribes.

May 13, 2020 – Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, warns that the coronavirus may never go away and may just join the mix of viruses that kill people around the world every year.

May 19, 2020 – WHO agrees to hold an inquiry into the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. WHO member states adopt the proposal with no objections during the World Health Assembly meeting, after the European Union and Australia led calls for an investigation.

May 23, 2020 – China reports no new symptomatic coronavirus cases, the first time since the beginning of the outbreak in December.

May 27, 2020 – Data collected by Johns Hopkins University reports that the coronavirus has killed more than 100,000 people across the US, meaning that an average of almost 900 Americans died each day since the first known coronavirus-related death was reported nearly four months earlier.

June 2, 2020 – Wuhan’s Health Commission announces that it has completed coronavirus tests on 9.9 million of its residents with no new confirmed cases found.

June 8, 2020 – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announces that almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand will be lifted after the country reported no active cases.

June 11, 2020 – The United States passes 2 million confirmed cases of the virus, according to Johns Hopkins.

June 16, 2020 – University of Oxford scientists leading the Recovery Trial, a large UK-based trial investigating potential Covid-19 treatments, announce that a low-dose regimen of dexamethasone for 10 days was found to reduce the risk of death by a third among hospitalized patients requiring ventilation in the trial.

June 20, 2020 – The NIH announces that it has halted a clinical trial evaluating the safety and effectiveness of drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus. “A data and safety monitoring board met late Friday and determined that while there was no harm, the study drug was very unlikely to be beneficial to hospitalized patients with Covid-19,” the NIH says in a statement.

June 26, 2020 – During a virtual media briefing, WHO announces that it plans to deliver about 2 billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine to people across the globe. One billion of those doses will be purchased for low- and middle-income countries, according to WHO.

July 1, 2020 – The European Union announces it will allow travelers from 14 countries outside the bloc to visit EU countries, months after it shut its external borders in response to the pandemic. The list does not include the US, which doesn’t meet the criteria set by the EU for it to be considered a “safe country.”

July 6, 2020 – In an open letter published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, 239 scientists from around the world urge WHO and other health agencies to be more forthright in explaining the potential airborne transmission of coronavirus. In the letter, scientists write that studies “have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that viruses are released during exhalation, talking, and coughing in microdroplets small enough to remain aloft in air and pose a risk of exposure at distances beyond 1 to 2 meters (yards) from an infected individual.”

July 7, 2020 – The Trump administration notifies Congress and the United Nations that the United States is formally withdrawing from WHO. The withdrawal goes into effect on July 6, 2021.

July 21, 2020 – European leaders agree to create a €750 billion ($858 billion) recovery fund to rebuild EU economies ravaged by the coronavirus.

July 27, 2020 – A vaccine being developed by the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in partnership with the biotechnology company Moderna, enters Phase 3 testing. The trial is expected to enroll about 30,000 adult volunteers and evaluates the safety of the vaccine and whether it can prevent symptomatic Covid-19 after two doses, among other outcomes.

August 11, 2020 – In a live teleconference, Russian President Vladimir Putin announces that Russia has approved a coronavirus vaccine for public use before completion of Phase 3 trials, which usually precedes approval. The vaccine, which is named Sputnik-V, is developed by the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute with funding from the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF).

August 15, 2020 – Russia begins production on Sputnik-V, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

August 23, 2020 – The FDA issues an emergency use authorization for the use of convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19. It is made using the blood of people who have recovered from coronavirus infections.

August 27, 2020 – The CDC notifies public health officials around the United States to prepare to distribute a potential coronavirus vaccine as soon as late October. In the documents, posted by The New York Times, the CDC provides planning scenarios to help states prepare and advises on who should get vaccinated first – healthcare professionals, essential workers, national security “populations” and long-term care facility residents and staff.

September 4, 2020 – The first peer-reviewed results of Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine are published in the medical journal The Lancet. The results “have a good safety profile” and the vaccine induced antibody responses in all participants, The Lancet says.

October 2, 2020 – Trump announces that he and first lady Melania Trump have tested positive for Covid-19. He spends three nights at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center receiving treatment before returning to the White House.

October 12, 2020 – Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson announces it has paused the advanced clinical trial of its experimental coronavirus vaccine because of an unexplained illness in one of the volunteers.”Following our guidelines, the participant’s illness is being reviewed and evaluated by the ENSEMBLE independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) as well as our internal clinical and safety physicians,” the company said in a statement. ENSEMBLE is the name of the study. The trial resumes later in the month.

December 10, 2020 – Vaccine advisers to the FDA vote to recommend the agency grant emergency use authorization to Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine.

December 14, 2020 – US officials announce the first doses of the FDA authorized Pfizer vaccine have been delivered to all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

December 18, 2020 – The FDA authorizes a second coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna for emergency use. “The emergency use authorization allows the vaccine to be distributed in the U.S. for use in individuals 18 years and older,” the FDA said in a tweet.

January 14, 2021 – The WHO team tasked with investigating the origins of the outbreak in Wuhan arrive in China.

January 20, 2021 – Newly elected US President Joe Biden halts the United States’ withdrawal from WHO.

February 22, 2021 – The death toll from Covid-19 exceeds 500,000 in the United States.

February 27, 2021 – The FDA grants emergency use authorization to Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine, the first single dose Covid-19 vaccine available in the US.

March 30, 2021 – According to a 120-page report from WHO, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 probably spread to people through an animal, and probably started spreading among humans no more than a month or two before it was noticed in December of 2019. The report says a scenario where it spread via an intermediate animal host, possibly a wild animal captured and then raised on a farm, is “very likely.”

April 17, 2021 – The global tally of deaths from Covid-19 surpasses 3 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins.

August 3, 2021 – According to figures published by the CDC, the more contagious Delta variant accounts for an estimated 93.4% of coronavirus circulating in the United States during the last two weeks of July. The figures show a rapid increase over the past two months, up from around 3% in the two weeks ending May 22.

August 12, 2021 – The FDA authorizes an additional Covid-19 vaccine dose for certain immunocompromised people.

August 23, 2021 – The FDA grants full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people age 16 and older, making it the first coronavirus vaccine approved by the FDA.

September 24, 2021 – CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky diverges from the agency’s independent vaccine advisers to recommend boosters for a broader group of people – those ages 18 to 64 who are at increased risk of Covid-19 because of their workplaces or institutional settings – in addition to older adults, long-term care facility residents and some people with underlying health conditions.

November 2, 2021 – Walensky says she is endorsing a recommendation to vaccinate children ages 5-11 against Covid-19, clearing the way for immediate vaccination of the youngest age group yet in the US.

November 19, 2021 – The FDA authorizes boosters of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines for all adults. The same day, the CDC also endorses boosters for all adults.

December 16, 2021 – The CDC changes its recommendations for Covid-19 vaccines to make clear that shots made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech are preferred over Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.

December 22, 2021 – The FDA authorizes Pfizer’s antiviral pill, Paxlovid, to treat Covid-19, the first antiviral Covid-19 pill authorized in the United States for ill people to take at home, before they get sick enough to be hospitalized. The following day, the FDA authorizes Merck’s antiviral pill, molnupiravir.

December 27, 2021 – The CDC shortens the recommended times that people should isolate when they’ve tested positive for Covid-19 from 10 days to five days if they don’t have symptoms – and if they wear a mask around others for at least five more days. The CDC also shortens the recommended time for people to quarantine if they are exposed to the virus to a similar five days if they are vaccinated.

January 31, 2022 – The FDA grants full approval to Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for those ages 18 and older. This is the second coronavirus vaccine given full approval by the FDA.

March 29, 2022 – The FDA authorizes a second booster of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines for adults 50 and older. That same day, the CDC also endorses a second booster for the same age group.

April 25, 2022 – The FDA expands approval of the drug remdesivir to treat patients as young as 28 days and weighing about seven pounds.

May 17, 2022 – The FDA authorizes a booster dose of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 at least five months after completion of the primary vaccine series. On May 19, the CDC also endorses a booster dose for the same age group.

June 18, 2022 – The CDC recommends Covid-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.

August 31, 2022 – The FDA authorizes updated Covid-19 vaccine booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer. Both are bivalent vaccines that combine the companies’ original vaccine with one that targets the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sublineages. The CDC signs off on the updated booster shots the following day.

May 5, 2023 – The WHO says Covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency.

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May 6, 2023

The way the US government tracks Covid-19 is about to change | CNN

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CNN
—

When the US public health emergency ends May 11, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have to change some of the ways it tracks Covid-19 in the United States, but the agency says it won’t lose its sightlines on the infection as it continues to be part of American life.

On Thursday, for the first time in three years, the CDC will stop posting a national count of Covid-19 cases. The agency’s color-coded maps of county-level transmission and disease burden will be retired, the CDC will no longer track variants down to the state level, and it will update its genomic surveillance estimates every two weeks instead of weekly.

“Though our data going forward will be different, they will continue to provide timely insights for CDC, for local health officials, as well as for the public to understand Covid-19 dynamics,” CDC Principal Deputy Director Dr. Nirav Shah said.

“In short, we will still be able to tell that it’s snowing, even though we’re no longer counting every snowflake.”

Instead of following Covid-19 cases, the agency will track the burden and spread of disease primarily through hospitalizations and deaths.

The move to stop posting a national case count is largely symbolic. The number of Covid-19 cases known to public health officials has long been undercounted. The percent of detected cases has only fallen further as people have turned to rapid home testing for a diagnosis. At some points in the pandemic, experts estimated that the true number of cases was more than 14 times higher than official counts.

Other metrics that people are used to seeing on the CDC’s Covid Data Tracker are also going to go away. As CNN previously reported, the CDC will stop publishing detailed, color-coded Covid-19 Transmission Levels and Covid-19 Community Level maps that have been tied to recommendations about when to wear masks, when it’s a good idea for people to test to prevent the spread of disease and when to avoid large indoor public gatherings.

When the public health emergency ends, more states are expected to stop reporting Covid-19 cases to CDC. Iowa, for example, has already stopped. So the CDC says it won’t be feasible to maintain a national count or update its maps.

Future recommendations for precautions like masking will instead be tied to hospitalization levels.

Covid-19 will retain its designation as a nationally notifiable disease, but that’s just a recommendation, says Dr. Brendan Jackson, who leads the CDC’s Covid-19 response. It doesn’t carry any authority for required reporting. When the public health emergency ends, it will be a state-by-state decision whether to share those numbers, Jackson said Thursday.

The CDC says it will still publish the case counts it gets from states, but that will be in a different section of its website, and the numbers won’t be totaled.

Some experts say they’re disappointed to see that the CDC will have to go back to an older, fragmented system of having to ask states to share data.

“We’re kind of reverting back to a system where the CDC kind of independently negotiates all these data sharing agreements with the states and they make it more voluntary,” said Beth Blauer, associate vice provost for public sector innovation at Johns Hopkins University.

“I think having the states do this all independently doesn’t make a ton of sense because it doesn’t help us understand, in the aggregate, the impact that disease is having on our communities,” Blauer said.

She also said it will be very difficult to scale this system back up should another large, immediate public health threat emerge.

Starting next week, vaccination counts will become discretionary. Jackson said that most, but not all, of the 64 jurisdictions that report to the CDC have signed data use agreements to share their vaccine administration numbers. They may not share as much as they have in the past about who is getting vaccinated or do it as frequently, which may limit the nation’s ability to spot widespread racial, ethnic or socioeconomic disparities for future vaccination campaigns. Starting in June, the CDC says, it will update its vaccination data on a monthly basis.

Laboratories will no longer be required to send testing data to the CDC, which will hamper the ability to understand test positivity rates, a metric that, early in the pandemic, helped public health officials know whether they were doing enough testing or if transmission in a community was going up or down. Positivity rates were used in the transmission maps but also for the CDC’s tracking of variants.

The CDC will still get some lab testing data from another system called the National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System, a network of about 450 labs that help it track illnesses like influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

Variant tracking will continue, but the CDC will have to adjust some of the metrics it uses to model variant proportions. State-level estimates of variant proportions with go away, but regional levels will remain. Those will be updated twice a month going forward instead of weekly, as they are now.

The way the CDC will collect data on deaths will change, too. Instead of scraping numbers from state website and getting direct reports from states, which counted deaths based on the date they were reported, the CDC will switch to a national system that counts deaths based on death certificate data. The agency says this system has become much more timely and will be a more stable way to count Covid-19 deaths going forward. It will also add a new metric to its death reporting: the percentage of all deaths reported that week that are caused by Covid-19.

Hospitals will still have to report Covid-19 data through April 2024, but they won’t track as many metrics or submit that information as frequently. Hospitals have shared information daily through most of the pandemic, but now that reporting will be weekly.

Hospitalizations and deaths are known as lagging indicators because they increase only after people have gotten sick. Studies released Friday from CDC epidemiologists show that hospitalizations may not lag behind cases as much as we once thought they did.

The new studies, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, show that Covid-19 hospitalizations lagged one day behind increases in reported cases and four days behind increases in emergency room visits.

The research also shows that the new system the CDC will be using to track deaths will show trends 13 days earlier than data collected from states, the system that’s being discontinued.

With case levels low across most of the country, the need for these kinds of insights has gone away, or scientists have found other ways to get the information, such as testing of wastewater, which begins to increase about a week before testing data reflects an uptick in spread. Wastewater testing is available in some places, but not all areas have this capability.

The CDC will also maintain traveler surveillance, testing wastewater on airplanes in an effort to spot new incoming threats.

The CDC will also maintain what it calls sentinel systems: smaller, but nationally representative networks of hospitals and laboratories that will feed in more detailed data. This is much the same way the agency tracks patterns in other respiratory diseases, such as the flu and RSV. The CDC says recent investments in these sentinel systems will help it maintain eyes on Covid-19.

Instead, it will be using hospitalizations and emergency room visits as the primary ways it tracks Covid-19 and as the basis for its recommendations. When hospitalization rates in an area are high, for example, it will be recommending that people wear masks, said Jackson.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky acknowledged some of these data changes in a Senate committee hearing this week, although she emphasized that the CDC was not “changing the steam” of its work on Covid-19.

“As the public health emergency is set to end next week, I do want to just reiterate that we at CDC are not changing the steam at which we are working through resolving this public health emergency,” Walensky said at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions.

“It is the case at the end of the public health emergency, we will have less window as to the data,” she said. “We won’t get laboratory reporting. We won’t get case reporting. So we’ll lose some of that.”

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May 5, 2023

US government is testing avian flu vaccines for birds, but ending the historic outbreak isn’t that simple | CNN

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CNN
—

The United States is facing what some experts are calling “a new era for bird flu.”

Since January 2022, the country has been battling the biggest outbreak yet of highly pathogenic avian influenza in wildlife. The virus is a major threat to commercial and backyard flocks, and it has started to show up in hundreds of mammals, including a handful of pet cats.

The risk to humans is low; there has been only one human case of this virus in the US since the outbreak began, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and nine cases globally, mostly among people who work with birds. The CDC says there are trials underway of vaccines that could be used to protect humans in case the virus changes and becomes more of a threat.

Separately, the US Department of Agriculture, the US National Poultry Research Center and labs at a handful of American universities have been experimenting with vaccine candidates to be used in birds.

The USDA’s Agriculture Research Service started trials of four vaccine candidates for animals in April and expects to have initial data on a single-dose vaccine available this month. A two-dose vaccine challenge study – in which animals are exposed to the virus to see how well the vaccine works – should produce results in June.

If the animal vaccines look to be protective, the USDA’s next step would be to work with manufacturers on whether it would be feasible to use them.

One manufacturer, Zoetis, announced April 5 the development of a vaccine geared toward currently circulating virus strains. The company says it would take about a year to get to the distribution stage in the US.

Vaccines are already available in other countries, including China, Egypt, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico and Vietnam, and some nations are vaccinating their commercial flocks.

However, in the United States, not all poultry experts are ready to use a vaccine, even if one becomes available – at least, not yet. Instead, their focus remains on eradicating the virus.

As of April 26, the CDC says, nearly 58.8 million poultry have been affected by avian flu since January 2022. The virus has been detected in at least 6,737 wild birds, and the number is likely to be much higher. There have been poultry outbreaks in 47 states.

Although this is the worst outbreak in history, improved biosecurity measures have vastly reduced the number of cases in the commercial sector, according to the USDA. When the outbreak began in early 2022, there were 51 detections among commercial poultry. In March 2023, there were only seven.

The USDA says close surveillance work among its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and state and industry partners led to the reduction in cases.

Generally, there ares two ways of confronting this kind of highly infectious disease in poultry, according to Rodrigo Gallardo, a professor in poultry medicine and a specialist in avian virology at the University of California, Davis.

“One of them is through vaccination action. And then the other one is through eradication,” he said.

In the United States, the latter is the approach for now, Gallardo said.

If farmers detect even a single case in a flock, they will put down the birds right away.

“The virus keeps replicating and amplifying if the birds are alive, so the only way of stopping the replication and limiting the dissemination is by depopulation,” Gallardo said.

Tom Super, the senior vice president for communications for the National Chicken Council, the national trade association for the US broiler chicken industry, said in an email to CNN that although it supports the ongoing discussions about a vaccination program, “currently we support the eradication policy of APHIS and believe that right now this is the best approach at eliminating [bird flu] in the U.S.”

The US Poultry and Egg Association said it’s “certainly a topic of discussion,” but the organization doesn’t have a position on implementing a vaccination program.

A vaccination program comes with several complications, Gallardo said. Vaccinated birds would be protected, but with this highly infectious disease, they still could shed some virus that could infect unprotected birds.

“So vaccination, in that case, creates amplification if it is not done right,” Gallardo said.

Plus, it’s difficult to detect the disease in vaccinated birds. Birds that are vaccinated don’t always show signs if they’re sick, so it would be hard to know what birds to keep separate from the others. Tests also have a hard time telling the difference between antibodies generated by vaccination and antibodies from an infection.

“If you’re not able to diagnose it, it might spread more than what it would do if you are able to diagnose it and eradicate it,” Gallardo said.

Countries that have chosen the vaccination route see more endemic strains develop, meaning the virus is never really totally wiped out.

“This is a very variable virus, and if you don’t update the vaccine that you’re applying to meet the change in the virus, then you won’t be able to completely protect the birds. Partial protection means more birds will be spreading the virus,” Gallardo said.

A vaccine has never been used against highly pathogenic avian influenza in the US, according to the USDA. The agency created a vaccine after an outbreak in 2014 and 2015, but that involved a different strain, so it wouldn’t work on the latest version of the virus.

The logistics of a vaccine like this are difficult, said Dr. Yuko Sato, an associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University.

“You have to make sure that the new vaccine will protect against this current virus and hope that it doesn’t mutate or change so that the vaccine will continue to be protective,” Sato said.

“The vaccine is not a silver bullet. This is not going to prevent infection of the birds, so in order to have an exit strategy as the country, you would have to make sure that if you vaccinate, if you still have positive birds, you have to be able to make sure that you could stamp out the virus. Otherwise, we’ll never be looking at eradicating the virus from the United States.”

Another concern: Birds are a big business in the US.

The US has the largest poultry industry in the world, with 294,000 poultry farms. The market size for chicken and turkey meat production alone for 2023 is projected to generate $57.8 billion, according to market analysis firm IbisWorld.

Bird flu has hurt business in the US, but it could do so in a bigger way if the nation vaccinates poultry, according to the National Chicken Council.

“The National Chicken Council does not support the use of a vaccine for [bird flu] for a variety of reasons – the primary one being trade. Most countries, including the US, do not recognize countries that vaccinate as free of [bird flu] due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the disease. Therefore, they do not accept exports from countries that do vaccinate,” Super wrote in his email.

The US broiler industry is the second largest exporter of chicken in the world. It exports about 18% of the chicken meat produced in the United States, valued at more than $5 billion annually.

“If we start vaccinating for [bird flu] in the U.S., the broiler industry will lose our ability to export which will have a significant impact on the industry – while costing billions and billions of dollars to the U.S. economy every year,” Super said.

With the way the disease is spreading, scientists would also probably have to vaccinate wildlife – which is nearly impossible.

Of the birds affected in this outbreak, about 76% are commercial egg-laying hens, 17% are turkeys, and only 5% are broilers, the chickens used for meat, Super said. The rest of the cases have been among ducks, backyard chickens and game birds.

“So the U.S. poultry sector that least needs a vaccine would have the most to risk from using one,” he said.

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