Research Publications (Food Safety)

We read with interest the Article by Yap Boum and colleagues,1 which brought significant insight into the importance of rapid diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2. Boum and colleagues provided useful information about the patterns of patient presentation. However, some important considerations lead us to suggest an improvement to the algorithm they describe in figure 2A.1 Our feeling is that the clinical context for the suspicion of COVID-19 warrants consideration.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to incorporate pathogen genomics for enhanced disease surveillance and outbreak management in Africa. The genomics of SARS-CoV-2 has been instrumental to the timely development of diagnostics and vaccines and in elucidating transmission dynamics.

On June 30, 2021, findings from a report by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the European Food Safety Authority, and the European Medicines Agency have shown that use of antibiotics in food-producing animals is decreasing in Europe.

It has not been a good year for faecal microbiota transplantation.

SF2a-TT15 was safe and well tolerated and induced high titres of anti-SF2a LPS IgG antibodies. These results support further evaluation of this original synthetic oligosaccharide-protein conjugate vaccine candidate for safety, immunogenicity, and protective efficacy in target populations.

Controversy surrounds the ranking by clinical importance of diarrhoeal disease pathogens.

In light of the ongoing pandemic, development of vaccines to protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease is an important public health priority. As of February 2021, two SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have received emergency use authorisation by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), both of which use mRNA technology.

Scientists used human white blood cell membranes to carry two drugs, an antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory, directly to infected lungs in mice. The nano-sized drug delivery method shows a potential new strategy for treating infectious diseases, including COVID-19. The researchers developed a method to essentially peel the membrane from neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cells that lead the body's immune system response.

In the absence of an effective vaccine, the efficacy of antimalarial chemotherapies underpins the success of malaria control programmes.

The use of antibiotics anywhere could select antibiotic-resistant bacteria everywhere. Reducing the use of antibiotics in farm animals is consequently fundamental to preserve the current and future benefits of antibiotics for people.

Clinical research is necessary for an effective response to an emerging infectious disease outbreak. However, research efforts are often hastily organised and done using various research tools, with the result that pooling data across studies is challenging.

COVID-19 poses an extraordinary threat to global public health and an effective vaccine could provide a key means of overcoming this crisis. Human challenge studies involve the intentional infection of research participants and can accelerate or improve vaccine development by rapidly providing estimates of vaccine safety and efficacy.

Our data on cases as well as their infected and uninfected close contacts provide key insights into the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2. This analysis shows that isolation and contact tracing reduce the time during which cases are infectious in the community, thereby reducing the R. The overall impact of isolation and contact tracing, however, is uncertain and highly dependent on the number of asymptomatic cases.

Although patients in our study presented with predominately mild, non-specific symptoms, infectiousness before or on the day of symptom onset was substantial. Additionally, the incubation period was often very short and false-negative tests occurred. These results suggest that although the outbreak was controlled, successful long-term and global containment of COVID-19 could be difficult to achieve.

If modern medicine, vaccines, and antibiotics have convinced you that humankind has, by and large, won the war against infectious diseases—and that the COVID-19 pandemic is a freak and unpredictable event—Meera Senthilingam's Outbreaks and epidemics: battling infection from measles to coronavirus could make for a disquieting, if eye-opening, read.

Although now a Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Annelies Wilder-Smith did not seek out a career in emerging infectious diseases. Her career goal had always been tropical and travel medicine, “but emerging infectious diseases came to me”, she tells The Lancet Infectious Diseases. She faced the first severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak when living in Asia in 2003.

US researchers have identified four compounds with in-vitro potency against severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). X-ray crystallography and 3D modelling of molecular docking showed that the compounds targeted the virus' main protease, Mpro, which is essential in host-cell entry and viral replication.

Lockdown measures and school closures affect girls and women differently across the world and may have long-term negative consequences. Talha Burki reports.

Ektorp E. Death threats after a trial on chloroquine for COVID-19.

The publication of a new WHO road map to reduce the burden of neglected tropical diseases highlights the importance of strengthening health systems. Tim Jesudason reports.

Racial violence and racial health inequities in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately impact on Blacks. Sharrelle Barber reports.

Huang Y, Cheng W, Zhao N, Qu H, Tian J. CT screening for early diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Lancet Infect Dis 2020; published online March 26. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30241-3—In this Correspondence, the affiliation Guangdong Province Hospital for Occupational Disease Prevention and Treatment has been corrected.

We thank Mohamed Hassany and colleagues, Ahmed Negida, Tarek Sahmoud, and Khaled Elmeleegy for raising their concerns about our modelling study. We would like to reiterate that the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in every country worldwide (Egypt included) is an underestimate of the true burden of illness, regardless of the screening programmes in place.

To estimate the burden of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Egypt, Ashleigh R Tuite and colleagues1 used the same model of exported case detection used by Fraser and colleagues for the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico.2 However, Tuite and colleagues neither clarified nor verified the assumptions of this exported case-detection model.

In December, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged in Wuhan, China, causing a pandemic that continues to spread globally.1 86 countries have reported cases.2 As of March 6, 2020, Egypt has reported three cases of COVID-19; however, at least 14 cases have been exported from Egypt to four countries.3 The burden of infection in Egypt, therefore, might be substantially larger than reported.