Year: 2015

CONAKRY, Guinea (AP) — Schools shuttered during the height of the Ebola crisis in Guinea are reopening but many parents are still too afraid to send their children for fear of infection.
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Israel has reported the first cases of a highly pathogenic bird flu virus in nearly three years in a village in the northern district of Hazafon, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Monday. The deadly H5N1 virus caused the death of 15,000 birds at a turkey fattening farm in Avi’el, south of Haifa, the OIE reported on its website, citing data submitted by Israel’s ministry of agriculture.
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Gunmen on Monday wounded a policeman who was guarding a polio vaccination team in Pakistan's port city of Karachi, the latest in a series of attacks on the teams in the country. Unidentified gunmen riding a motorbike opened fire at the team and then fled, police said. "Two gunmen opened fire at the policeman who was on duty to guard the vaccinators," Ali Asif, a senior police official in the area, told AFP, adding that the vaccination campaign in the area had now been postponed. The militants claim that polio vaccination is a front for espionage or a conspiracy to sterilise Muslims.

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Underimmunization is tied to an increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, the researchers write in the journal Pediatrics. “We now have the opportunity to use really sophisticated methods to identify these kinds of clusters of undervaccination or vaccine refusal,” said Dr. Tracy Lieu, the study’s lead author from the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that vaccine rates remain high, some vaccine-preventable diseases, like measles, have made comebacks in recent years. Lieu and colleagues hope that by identifying clusters of people who refuse to vaccinate their children or refuse certain shots, researchers can target prevention efforts.
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The age at which babies are introduced to foods with gluten doesn’t affect their risk of developing celiac disease, a new study finds. Earlier studies had suggested that introducing gluten between the ages of four and six months might lower the risk of celiac disease, a condition in which gluten in food triggers a damaging immune response in the small intestines. Carin Andrén Aronsson, the study’s lead author from Lund University in Malmö, Sweden, said parents should still follow the general recommendation for introducing children to gluten. “For Europe anyway you should introduce gluten in small amounts at four to six months of ages,” she said.
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