Enlarge / The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters stands in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg )

The tally of COVID-19 cases linked to a conference of disease detectives hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April has reached at least 181, the agency reported .

Roughly 1,800 gathered in person for this year's annual Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Conference, which was held on April 24 to 27 in a hotel conference facility in Atlanta where the CDC's headquarters are located. It was the first time the 70-year-old conference had in-person attendees since 2019. The CDC agency estimates an additional 400 attended virtually this year.

By the last day of the event, a number of in-person attendees had reported testing positive for COVID-19, causing conference organizers to warn attendees and make changes to reduce the chance of further spread. That reportedly included canceling an in-person training and offering to extend the hotel stays of sick attendees who needed to isolate.

Enlarge / This 2006 image depicts two sides of a Petri dish (reverse L, front R) growing a filamentous colony of Fusarium solani , the potential fungal pathogen behind the outbreak. (credit: CDC/ Mark Lindsley, Sc.D. D(ABMM), Lynette Benjamin, Shirley McClinton )

A second person in the US has died in an outbreak of fungal meningitis linked to surgeries in Mexico that involved epidural anesthesia. While the case count is now up to 18, more than 200 others across 25 states may have also been exposed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in an outbreak update Wednesday .

So far, the outbreak among US patients spans 224 people, with 206 potentially exposed and under investigation, nine suspected cases, and nine probable cases. Two of the patients with probable cases have died.

Last week, the CDC released a travel advisory and a health alert to clinicians about the cases. At the time, health authorities had identified only five cases, all Texas residents , one of whom had died. An update Wednesday from Texas health officials said that they have since identified two more cases, bringing the state's total to seven. All seven cases were hospitalized, but the officials are still reporting only one death in Texas.

Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB. (credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases )

A woman with an untreated infectious case of tuberculosis and a months-old civil warrant out for her arrest continues to evade the sheriff's department in Tacoma, Washington, drawing local frustration.

On Friday, the woman failed to show up to yet another court hearing , to which she has been summoned on a roughly monthly basis since January 2022. That's when the county health department began using court orders to try to compel her to get her deadly respiratory infection treated and/or remain in isolation to protect the public until she is no longer infectious.

Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen ruled once again Friday that the woman—known only by the initials "V.N." in court documents—was in contempt of those court orders. Sorensen had initially issued a civil arrest warrant on March 2, 2023, ordering her to involuntary detention for testing and treatment. He extended the warrant Friday.

Enlarge / A Trichophyton indotineae infection on the back of an Indian man. (credit: Uhrlaß, S. et al. Journal of Fungi )

A dermatologist in New York City has reported the country's first known cases of highly contagious ringworm infections that are resistant to common anti-fungal treatments—and caused by a newly emerging fungus that is rapidly outstripping other infectious fungi around the world.

In February, the dermatologist reported two cases to health officials in the state, which are described in a brief case study published Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The two cases occurred a year apart and had no connection to each other. The first, from the summer of 2021, was in a 28-year-old pregnant woman who had no recent international travel history, no underlying medical conditions, and no known contact with anyone who had a similar rash. The case suggests that the fungus is quietly spreading in the community.

Enlarge / A person sits at the slot machines at a casino. (credit: Getty | Octavio Jones )

A Tacoma, Washington, woman who has refused court-ordered tuberculosis treatment for over a year is evading arrest and has reportedly taken public transit to go to a casino while on the lam.

The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has been trying to get the woman to comply with treatment since at least January 2022 , when she received her first court order. Since then, she has received over a dozen court orders for treatment and isolation amid monthly court hearings and order renewals. Last month, Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen finally found her in contempt and issued a warrant for her arrest and involuntary detention at the county jail for treatment and isolation .

"In each case like this, we are constantly balancing risk to the public and the civil liberties of the patient," the health department wrote in a blog post days before the arrest warrant was issued. "We are always hopeful a patient will choose to comply voluntarily. Seeking to enforce a court order through a civil arrest warrant is always our last resort."

Enlarge / Giant panda cub Huanlili plays with a bamboo during her first birthday at the Beauval zoological park in Saint-Aignan, central France, on August 2, 2022. (credit: Getty | GUILLAUME SOUVANT )

Chinese scientists have published their long-awaited genetic analysis of the samples and swabs they collected in early 2020 from the Huanan Seafood Market, the initial epicenter of the pandemic.

In the study , published Wednesday in Nature, the authors acknowledge for the first time that wildlife susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection—including raccoon dogs —were present in the market amid the plethora of genetic traces from SARS-CoV-2 and humans. But, the overall analysis is flawed, indicating the presence of animals that were almost certainly not at the market, including giant pandas, chimpanzees, and Atlantic grey seals. The authors continued to downplay the potential that a virus spillover from wildlife to humans in the crowded market was the spark that ignited the pandemic. Instead, they repeatedly put forward, without evidence, hypotheses favored by Chinese officials, namely that the virus was carried into the market via humans or frozen foods, and the bustling venue became an amplifier site for infection.

Still, the publication of the data is momentous—and a long time coming. Though the samples were collected from January 1 to March 30 of 2020, a draft of the study and some of the data were only first released in a preprint two years later, in February 2022. The preprint reported that SARS-CoV-2 was abundant amid human genetic material from the samples, indicating that the virus was prevalent among people at the market before it was shuttered on the morning of January 1. The authors, led by scientists at China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), noted that they had also tested some animals in the market—mostly rabbits, stray cats, and snakes—but all were negative for SARS-CoV-2.

Enlarge / An electron micrograph of a number of Marburg virions responsible for causing Marburg virus disease. (credit: Getty | BSIP )

Equatorial Guinea's first-ever outbreak of Marburg virus —a relative of Ebola virus that causes similarly deadly hemorrhagic fever—is continuing to grow, spreading over a wide geographic area with potentially undetected chains of transmission, officials for the World Health Organization said.

As of Wednesday morning, officials in Equatorial Guinea had reported nine confirmed cases, with seven confirmed deaths across three provinces since early February.

"However, these three provinces are 150 kilometers apart, suggesting wider transmission of the virus," WHO's Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference Wednesday .

Enlarge (credit: Getty | UniversalImagesGroup )

Two more people have died and more details of horrifying eye infections are emerging in a nationwide outbreak linked to recalled eye drops from EzriCare and Delsam .

The death toll now stands at three, according to an outbreak update this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 68 people in 16 states have been infected with a rare, extensively drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain linked to the eye drops. In addition to the deaths, eight people have reported vision loss and four have had their eyeballs surgically removed (enucleation).

In a case report published this week in JAMA Ophthalmology, eye doctors at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, part of the University of Miami Health System, reported details of one case linked to the outbreak—a case in a 72-year-old man who has an ongoing infection in his right eye with vision loss, despite weeks of treatment with multiple antibiotics. When the man first sought treatment he reported pain in his right eye, which only had the ability to detect motion at the point, while his left eye had 20/20 vision. Doctors noted that the white of his right eye was entirely red and white blood cells had visibly pooled on his cornea and in the front inner chamber of his eye.