“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce
In a new document providing guidance for public health officials on COVID-19, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the infection fatality rate (IFR) for the disease at 0.4 percent, or about half the nearly one percent fatality rate the CDC estimated in March 2020 when it was predicting up to 1.7 […]
Health experts say the mortality rate of the coronavirus will likely drop as more is learned about the virus and more cases are accounted for. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization’s director general said, globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than one percent […]
As vaccine-related bills are being introduced into state legislatures this month, a bill (HB1090) has been proposed in the Virginia legislature to require school children to receive every dose of all current and future vaccines added to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) appointed by the U.S. Centers […]
Harvard Medical School graduate and pediatric oncologist Stephanie Taylor, MD once took care of children with cancer at a teaching hospital. She wondered why many of her young patients contracted infections, such as influenza, despite the hospital’s heavy emphasis on prevention. Taylor began to suspect increased susceptibility to contracting infections might have something to do […]
On Aug. 6, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG submitted a biologics license application (BLA) for the spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) gene therapy Zolgensma (onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi) with manipulated data and failed to inform regulators until June 28, 2019—more than a month after the […]
In a lawsuit filed by the state of Oklahoma against Johnson & Johnson, Inc., Purdue Pharma LP and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries were ordered on Aug. 26, 2019 to pay $572 million in penalties for helping to fuel the opioid crisis in Oklahoma.1 Before the trial […]
Story Highlights A case of diphtheria has been confirmed in an elementary school in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Three other people, who are asymptomatic carriers of the bacterial disease have been identified and are being treated in isolation. The diphtheria vaccine is only available as a combination vaccine (DT, Td, DTaP, Tdap) and its effectiveness wanes over […]