Healthcare & Laboratory News

Reuters (6/8, Rigby) reports vaccine group Gavi “said on Monday it hopes to use $600 million in soon-to-be-restored US funding to boost malaria and other vaccination efforts, as it also meets US conditions over phasing out the preservative thimerosal in other vaccines in its portfolio.” The funding also will help Gavi “speed up a planned shift towards two vaccines which do not contain the ​mercury-based preservative, thimerosal.” The vaccine group aims “to move to supporting countries with a newer meningitis vaccine and a vaccine that protects against six diseases, rather than five, to offer broader protection. Neither of the newer shots contains thimerosal.”

Managed Healthcare Executive (6/8, Lutton) reports early-stage trial results published in the Journal of Infection show investigational vaccine pEVAC-PS – which is “designed to protect against not just COVID-19 but the entire family of related coronaviruses” – was “well tolerated at all four dose levels, with no serious side effects.” Immune responses to the vaccine “were modest. Antibody levels rose in the higher-dose groups, but interpreting the results was complicated by the timing of the trial, which ran through successive COVID-19 waves.”

Infectious Disease Advisor (6/8, Khaja) reports recent study results show that “methicillin resistance is not associated with worse short-term clinical outcomes among patients with Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia, despite notable differences in patient characteristics between methicillin-resistant S aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible S aureus (MSSA) infections.” The study found that “ICU admission occurred in 37.8% of patients with MRSA bacteremia and 43.0% of those with MSSA bacteremia. In-hospital mortality or hospice discharge was reported in 16.1% and 21.5% of patients, respectively.” The results were presented during the ASM Microbe 2026 meeting.

Infectious Disease Advisor (6/8, Khaja) reports that clarithromycin and levofloxacin resistance “occurs in approximately half of tested Helicobacter pylori isolates collected from patients in the Eastern United States, suggesting that commonly used treatment regimens may be less reliable for some patients,” study results show. The findings indicate “that treating this common infection is becoming more complex and that a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer sufficient, reinforcing the importance of personalized medicine in treating infectious diseases.” The results were presented during the ASM Microbe 2026 meeting.

Reuters (6/8, Biryabarema) reports WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom ​Ghebreyesus “said on Monday that Uganda should reconsider its decision to close its border with Democratic Republic of Congo because of an Ebola outbreak.” During a visit to an Ebola isolation unit at a Kampala, Uganda hospital, Tedros “said blanket travel restrictions don’t work,” adding he hoped Uganda’s authorities “reconsider” the temporary closure.

MedPage Today (6/8, George) reports, “Primitive or regressive reflexes – known as frontal release signs – later in life were associated with increased dementia risk, a longitudinal study of cognitively normal older adults showed.” Investigators found that “in adults with intact cognition, the presence of two or more frontal release signs was associated with a significantly higher risk of progressing to dementia over 7 years (HR 1.78, 95% CI 1.02-3.09).” The findings were published in JAMA Network Open.

Reuters (6/8, Gorman) reports some epidemiologists this summer will be busy “sifting through sewage and social media with the goal of keeping soccer fans and the public safe from severe illness during the World Cup, one of the largest and most globally diverse mass gatherings ever anticipated.” A public health team “plans to monitor wastewater and internet chatter to detect and track infectious diseases should they emerge in any of the US or Canadian cities hosting World Cup players, their matches, and millions of spectators, organizers said.” According to Reuters, “Detecting disease-causing microorganisms in wastewater can signal an outbreak in the making, giving health officials time to warn medical clinicians to look out for symptoms of diseases that might otherwise be misdiagnosed, and to urge the public to take precautions.”

NBC News (6/5, Edwards) reports US measles cases “reached 2,030 on Friday,” according to new CDC data, a total not far below “the 2,288 logged in all of 2025, a record-breaking year that saw more measles diagnoses than any year since 1991.” The US has seen “30 new outbreaks this year, compared to 48 last year, the CDC said. The majority of cases are children and teenagers. More than 92% are unvaccinated and 6% (127 of the 2,030 patients) have been hospitalized.” The Hill (6/5, Choi) says no fatalities “due to measles have been reported this year so far, unlike last year, when three unvaccinated people – two children and one adult – died. Measles cases have been reported by 40 jurisdictions with only 10 so far reported by international visitors to the US.”

HealthDay (6/5, Gotkine) reports about 16% “of COVID-19 cases develop postacute sequelae of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 infection (PASC),” researchers concluded in a large-scale retrospective cohort study. The researchers also found that 89.31% of patients with PASC “developed chronic conditions requiring ongoing clinical management; this represented 14.54% of the total number of COVID-19 cases.” The data were published in JAMA Network Open.

The Washington Post (6/5, Sun) reported that “the Ebola outbreak spreading through the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda could become more devastating than the largest Ebola epidemic in history unless efforts to contain it improve, according to modeling released Friday by the” CDC. By the time the “West Africa epidemic from 2014 to 2016 was over, more than 28,000 people had been infected and more than 11,000 had died, according to the World Health Organization.” According to the Post, “in one of the CDC’s worst-case scenarios for the current outbreak, more than 20,000 cases would occur within three months if only 1 in 5 infected people are identified and isolated within two days of developing symptoms.” The AP (6/5, Stobbe) reports, “Higher isolation rates, of 50% or 70%, could result in the number of cases being more like 10,000, CDC officials said.” However, if the actual number of fatalities “were greater in late May that currently recognized, that could make the outcomes worse, CDC officials said.” According to NBC News (6/5, Lovelace Jr.), “A separate CDC report, also published Friday, found that the risk to the general US population remains low.”