News

We hear a lot about influenza types A and B every year when flu season approaches, and occasionally about the less severe type C. Now researchers have identified a newly recognized form of the virus—influenza D.

When the colistin-resistant gene, mcr-1, was first found in China in 2015, health officials around the world knew that the gene would inevitably appear in their countries. It has since been detected in other parts of Asia, Europe, and North America, including Canada, which just released a 2016 report from their Canadian Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may revisit its travel guidance on south Florida as soon as early next week, if there are no new cases involving local transmission of the Zika virus in the region; however, local businesses continue to be impacted.

Using the mainstream media as the medium for their message, some of the nation’s leading physicians urged Congress to pass a “clean, bipartisan funding measure” to fight the spread of Zika, both in the United States and abroad, and to “protect pregnant women” from the complications associated with the virus.

Zika’s history as a “tropical” disease plays into the theory that global warming has played a role in the presence of virus-carrying Aedes Aegypti and Aedes Albopictus mosquitoes, and thus the disease itself, in heretofore “temperate” climates such as the southeastern United States.