This document assesses the risk to human health posed by a multi-country incident of botulism neurotoxin type E, possibly associated with consumption of a commercially-available dried and salted fish product.
The recent floods in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia caused substantial damage. Following the floods, there is a risk of increased transmission of vector-borne infections to the populations.
At the request of the European Commission, ECDC performed a risk assessment after six cases of wound botulism were reported in Norway among people who had injected heroin. As this is an ongoing problem, some relevant measures are proposed for consideration by other EU/EEA Member States.
New and noteworthy in this update: the retrospective identification of novel coronavirus in biological samples from two fatal cases in Jordan (April 2012) and the results of a joint ECDC/WHO survey which confirms that EU/EEA Member States have an adequate capacity to detect novel coronavirus through their network of national reference laboratories: 18 of 30 in EU/EEA countries are capable of confirming positive screened samples by either ORF1b RT-PCR or other target RT-PCR assays with sequence analysis or whole-genome sequence analysis.
CDC updated risk assessment concludes that in the absence of evidence of sustained person-to-person transmission outside of household settings, the current facts still point towards a hypothesis of a zoonotic or environmental source with occasional transmission to exposed humans. WHO does not advise any travel or trade restrictions at this point for KSA or Qatar.
The US CDC reported an outbreak of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) associated with staying in the ’Signature Tent Cabins’ in the Boystown area of Curry Village at Yosemite National Park, California, USA.