Hurricane Matthew’s sweep through southern Haiti last October killed hundreds; left nearly 200,000 without homes; and flooded rivers, latrines and wells, contaminating drinking water and prompting reports of increasing cholera cases in the hardest hit areas of the nation.
On October 13th and 14th, 2016, the Minister of Health and Population of Haiti, Dr. Daphnee Benoit, convened an expert panel to consult on the control of cholera in Haiti with specific reference to the use of vaccines in the aftermath of Hurricane Mathew; the consultation resulted in the following consensus.
The University of Florida has received a grant of nearly $10 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, for a five-year project to explore the occupational safety and health of people working in agriculture, fishing and forestry in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and North and South Carolina.
For more than four decades, cholera has recurred in Cameroon, affecting tens of thousands of people a year. Most recently, the West African country was one of four that had a death rate of more than five percent from the bacterial disease, exceeding the World Health Organization’s target of less than one percent. Now, researchers have discovered one reason Cameroon has struggled to control the disease. Cholera follows different, distinct outbreak patterns in different climate subzones of the large country, the researchers reported in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Diana Rojas, University of Florida The United States declared Zika a public health emergency in Puerto Rico in August 2016. Over 28,000 cases of Zika were reported in Puerto Rico as of Oct. 26.
A European research commission will award the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI) at the University of Florida nearly 1 million euros as part of a grant supporting interdisciplinary research on the Zika virus and its effects on pregnancy.
A non-virulent variant of the deadly Vibrio cholerae O1 strain has likely been present in Haitian aquatic environments for several hundred years, with the potential to become virulent through gene transfer with the toxigenic strain introduced by UN peacekeepers
A team of Italian and American researchers, including the University of Florida’s Ira Longini, Ph.D., has received the Aspen Institute Italia Award for scientific research and collaboration between Italy and the United States. The team was honored at a ceremony held today (Oct. 26) at the institute’s Rome headquarters.
A UF/IFAS researcher and his colleagues are far more certain now that a new biological treatment could prevent dairy cattle from getting uterine diseases, which might improve food safety for people. Their findings, in which they used chitosan microparticles to cure bacteria in the uteri, are published in a new study.
when the Ebola crisis in West Africa began capturing the world’s attention, UF biostatistics professor Ira Longini has been collaborating with a team of scientists at the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop a vaccine capable of protecting the most at-risk populations from the disease.
