Outbreak | featured news

An outbreak of a rare form of meningitis is likely to grow after sickening 26 people in five states, including four who died, health officials warned... All received steroid injections used mostly for back pain that have been traced back to a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. The pharmacy issued a recall last week and has shut down operations.

An outbreak of avian flu in Mexico has killed at least 870,000 poultry birds since its detection last month but poses no threat to humans, the agriculture ministry said.

An outbreak of a rare strain of salmonella poisoning linked to dog food has infected at least 14 people in nine states, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention said.

A frozen raw yellowfin tuna product from a California-based company likely is responsible for an outbreak of salmonella across 20 U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia, the CDC says.

The whooping cough vaccine given to babies and toddlers loses much of its effectiveness after just three years - a lot faster than doctors believed - and that could help explain a recent series of outbreaks in the U.S. among children who were fully vaccinated, a study suggests....

United Nations officials say outbreaks of measles in Ethiopia and Kenya have killed dozens of children and sickened thousands of others.

European health officials have cautiously identified contaminated fenugreek seeds as a probable common link between the large outbreak in Germany and a smaller one in France.

Five children admitted to hospital in northern France after eating beefburgers infected with a strain of E.coli bacteria are seriously ill, health officials said on Thursday, fanning fears of a wider outbreak.

The number of people falling sick as a result of E. coli contamination has slowed to a trickle, Germany's national disease control center said Tuesday, even as the death toll from the outbreak rose by one Tuesday to 37....

The strain of E. coli that has killed at least 25 people and sickened more than 2,600 others in Europe is a terrifying reminder that killer microbes lurk in places where we least expect them. Though it is not a reason to panic, this incident should force us to rethink some important food safety issues.