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Weekly Update

The CDC confirmed that rural Americans generally experience more health disparaties than urban and suburban Americans, and that the gap in suicide rates between rural and urban Americans has widened since 1999.

Last week, Cargill recalled over 132,000 pounds of ground beef. Although the CDC has declared the outbreak over, it warns that ground beef products produced and packaged on June 21, 2018 could be contaminated.

Vaccination policy and hurricane response are only two of many areas where response programs were constructed based on effective population level responses, only to have serious flaws revealed due to poor communication with and understanding of the public.

Water contamination due to flooding disasters is a large concern. In North Carolina, due to Hurricane Florence, at least 50 lagoons at swine facilities overflowed, with at least 2 failing completely and releasing over 7 million gallons of untreated waste into waterways.

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a prion disease affecting cervids, was first found in the 1960’s and has since spread to over 20 US states. No cases of human disease have been linked to consuming or handling infected animal products; prion diseases, however, have a notoriously long incubation periods.

The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) asked for help last week to find an unidentified woman who dropped off two dead bats at the University of Minnesota Veterinary Medical Center in St. Paul for rabies testing and left before her information could be collected. Both bats tested positive for rabies.

The United States and China, despite rising tariffs, trade heavily with each other. A developed trade partner like China reporting ASF demonstrates the real risk of foreign animal disease incursion to the United States.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is asking hunters to voluntarily submit samples to examine exposure and active infections of West Nile virus (WNV) in ruffed grouse.

Another outbreak of ASF occurred August 19th in Haizhou District of the city of Lianyungang, in the Jiangsu Province. This marks the third reported outbreak of ASF in China.