In a blow to efforts to stop a deadly virus that has wiped out 10 percent of the U.S. hog population, an Indiana farm has confirmed being re-infected with PEDv.
PEDv, or Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, has killed 7 million pigs and driven pork prices to record highs since first being found in the United States a year ago. The disease is almost always fatal to baby piglets.
Matt Ackerman, a veterinarian in southeastern Indiana confirmed the re-infection but declined to name the farm. The confirmation is a blow to containment efforts because federal and state officials had been working from the assumption when a pig was infected it would develop an immunity for a number of years.
Rumors had been spreading that the assumption was faulty and up to 30 percent of farms were seeing second outbreaks but the Indiana case is the first one officially confirmed by government officials. The virus was also confirmed to be the same exact strain of the virus as the previous infection.
The virus is known to spread through pig manure and can transmit from farm to farm on trucks. Veterinarians are now examining if the virus can spread through animal feed.
The outbreak is likely to cause even more reduction in the U.S. hog population and further drive up pork prices.
What doctors feared could happen in the Caribbean with the chikungunya virus has become a reality: the disease has obtained a foothold.
Doctors across the Caribbean are reporting over 4,000 cases of the mosquito-borne virus that causes high fever and intense joint pain. While 4,000 cases have been confirmed, there have been at least 31,000 other cases that have not been laboratory confirmed.
The painful illness is mostly found in Asia and Africa. The first case in the Caribbean was detected in December in St. Martin in a resident who have traveled back home from Africa.
The disease, while rarely fatal, causes severe joint pain that can last for months or years. In some cases, the pain is so significant that it leaves the patients unable to walk.
Doctors say the virus has no vaccine.
Doctors with the CDC are monitoring the situation where they say the virus is spreading in an “uncontrolled” manner. They advise anyone travelling to the Caribbean to make sure to wear heavy amounts of mosquito repellant and to make sure they refresh that protect on a regular basis.
Health officials in the region say that once a virus becomes entrenched in a region, it is extremely difficult to eradicate it. The area’s wet season is also coming up when it sees a major rise in the mosquito population.
The deadly MERS virus, originally found in Saudi Arabia and only in a few cases outside that nation, is now considered as having spread across the entire Middle East.
Egypt has issued a travel warning to Saudi Arabia after an Egyptian man has been found to have the fatal virus. Over 100 people have died after contracting the killer disease with a mortality rate over 45%.
The news of the travel warning comes ahead of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca by millions of Muslims around the world.
Egypt’s warning also includes the rare step of telling those with children under 15, adults over 65, pregnant women and anyone who suffers from respiratory diseases to not make the pilgrimage to Mecca this year.
Dr. Ala Alwan of the World Health Organization said the most concerning thing is that most of the cases now have been confirmed as human-to-human transmission rather than from bats or camels.
“Approximately 75 per cent of the recently reported cases are secondary cases, meaning that they are considered to have acquired the infection from another case through human-to-human transmission,” Dr Ala Alwan wrote in a statement.
Doctors have now been able to confirm that type 2 diabetes has a direct connection to the loss of brain matter.
Doctors have known for many years that diabetes has a negative impact on the brain but the study of patients using MRIs shows that long term diabetes has a direct correlation to the greatest loss of brain tissue.
“It’d been thought that most, if not all, of the effect of diabetes on the brain was due to vascular disease that diabetics gets and, therefore, stroke,” Dr. R. Nick Bryan of the University of Pennsylvania told Fox News. “We found in addition to that, there’s sort of diffuse loss of brain tissue, atrophy, we think may have a direct effect on the diabetes on the brain.”
A study of MRIs on patients close to 62 years of age with type 2 diabetes for at least 10 years showed the greatest reductions of the brain’s gray matter, where the neurons of the brain are located.
Researchers say that for people with diabetes, proper care is a priority to help delay the impact the disease will have on the vascular system and the brain.
A virus fatal to pigs is running rampant in the U.S. pig population is causing massive deaths and driving up the prices of pork to record levels.
The PEDv virus has wiped out the entire piglet populations of farms throughout the country. Agriculture officials in Oklahoma reported that one farm lost over 30,000 piglets from a PEDv outbreak.
Scientists say they have been unable to determine the origin of the outbreak.
The USDA reports that 7 million pigs nationwide have died from the virus. The outbreak began in Ohio according to the USDA and is now reported in at least 30 states. The nation’s hog herd has fallen to 63 million nationwide.
The virus is very virulent. One researcher said that one tablespoon of virus infected manure would be enough to infect the entire U.S. pig population.
Saudi Arabia fired Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabiah in the mist of the largest outbreak of the killer MERS virus since its discovery two years ago.
The news comes as two more people were confirmed to have died from the virus. A 73-year-old Saudi man died in Riyadh and a 54-year-old man in Jeddah died on Monday.
Saudi Arabia has been dealing with a major outbreak of the virus with over 20 infections discovered in the last week. The country’s death toll climbed to 83 and the total number of cases jumped to 261. The outbreak of the last week was more than ten percent of the total cases.
The now-former Health Minister had said on Monday he didn’t know why there was a sudden rise in the virus other than noting there was a small increase the previous April.
The World Health Organization confirmed the first cases of the virus in Southeast Asia. There is no vaccine for MERS.
Virologists made a scary new discovery in the investigation of the Ebola outbreak in Guinea.
It’s a new strain of the virus.
Researchers say that the discovery means that the outbreak has no connection to any previous outbreak in Africa. Ebola has a pattern of outbreak in the western parts of the country and the surprise outbreak in east Africa caught many health officials by surprise.
The scientists say that the new virus has been confirmed to have the same unknown ancestor of the western viruses. They say the virus likely was introduced into the region in December 2013.
The virus was also found in fruit bats within the region and it’s possible that the virus had mutated within the bats.
The virologists say that the new strain could be a potential catastrophe among the region as the area has never experienced a major Ebola outbreak until now.
The outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa is growing into more of a concern for world leaders.
Mali reported their first possible cases of Ebola since the beginning of an outbreak in neighboring Guinea. Government officials have isolated three people in Mali as they await confirmation testing from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Guinea reported their 90th death from the outbreak leading Doctors Without Borders to say this could become an unprecedented epidemic in a region that has extremely poor health care systems.
The outbreak has reached a point that foreign mining companies in Guinea have closed their operations and pulled their employees to their home nations. French officials say they are preparing screening at the airports for travels from the former French colonies.
In addition to Guinea, confirmed cases have been found in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Liberia confirmed three new deaths in the last 24 hours bringing their total to four.
DWB officials are concerned with the dense living conditions in cities where the virus has been found because it will be hard to stop the virus should it break out in a crowded living area.
The outbreak of mumps in central Ohio has more than quadrupled in recent weeks.
According to health authorities, the major increase in cases is happening on the campus of Ohio State University.
The Columbus Health Department reports four people have been hospitalized during the outbreak and at least 93 students or staff connected to the school have been infected with the virus.
Three of the people infected in the outbreak have been confirmed to have never received a vaccination for the mumps.
“If even one person is unvaccinated we are all at risk,” Jose Rodriguez of the Columbus health department told FoxNews. Rodriguez added that even with vaccinations, up to 20 percent of the population is vulnerable to the mumps virus.
One of the cases reportedly is severe enough that the patient could lose their hearing. In addition, four cases of orchitis have developed from the infection.
Last year in Franklin County, which includes Columbus, only one case of mumps had been reported.
Many people have been complaining this extended winter about colds that will not go away or colds that seem to go away but come back stronger within a week or two.
However, doctors say that it’s not that colds are leaving and coming back. It’s that colds can take longer to overcome and that because of so many different viruses that cause colds, it’s possible to get two different cold viruses back-to-back.
The common cold can last up to two weeks for the initial symptoms and the coughing that goes with it could last for weeks after the virus had been cleared from the body.
In the case of someone getting consecutive colds, some doctors believe that because the body’s immune system is weakened from dealing with one cold it leaves the body open to a different strain of cold virus. There are more than 200 known viruses that can cause the common cold.
The average adult gets 2 to 5 colds per year, children can have between 7 and 10. In the U.S. every year, about one billion Americans will get a cold.
