Disease | featured news

Executives at the Boston-area pharmacy whose steroid shots have been linked to a deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak have been sued in a bid to freeze their personal assets, while the death toll in the scandal rose to 21, with 268 cases of infection reported.

Seven more people have been diagnosed with fungal meningitis linked to possibly tainted vials of a steroid medication, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday, bringing the total number of cases to 205 in 14 states.

Two more people have died from fungal meningitis linked to steroid injections, bringing the total to 14 deaths since the outbreak began last month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said on Thursday.

The number of people infected with a rare type of meningitis tied to contaminated steroid injections has climbed to 105, federal health officials said Monday.

As authorities continue to focus on a potentially contaminated steroid as the source of a widening outbreak of fungal meningitis, some patient-safety advocates are calling for greater restrictions on the type of injection involved.

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.

The World Health Organization said Monday it is too soon to say whether there could be an outbreak of a SARS-like killer respiratory disease after health officials in Britain announced they detected a related virus in a severely ill patient from the Middle East.

Colton and Abbygail are among three children successfully treated for their immune deficiency during an experiment detailed in Tuesday’s issue of the journal Blood. Ainslie says she never doubted her decision to have Abbygail, despite the risks.

Nearly 20 years after hantavirus was first identified in the U.S., doctors are under pressure to quickly learn more about the pervasive and deadly disease. In his 30-plus years as a doctor, Bruce Tempest had never seen anything like it.

Scientists have found alarming levels of the lung disease tuberculosis in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America that are resistant to up to four powerful antibiotic drugs. In a large international study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, researchers found rates of both multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) were higher than previously thought and were threatening global efforts to curb the spread of the disease.