Looking to expand in medical nutrition, Nestle (OTCPK:NSRGY) is buying Allergan’s (NYSE:AGN) Zenpep, which had sales of $237M in 2018.
The product caters to people who cannot digest
food properly because their pancreas does not provide enough enzymes to
break down fat, protein, and carbohydrates.
“This is a significant opportunity for our
business in the United States to add a complementary product to our
existing range of nutrition products,” said Nestle’s Greg Behar.
Singapore’s economy will be impacted by the outbreak of a new
coronavirus that originated in China at the end of last year and has
spread to the city-state, its trade minister said on Monday.
The Southeast Asian travel and tourism hub, which recorded its lowest
growth rate in a decade last year at 0.7%, has reported four cases of
the coronavirus that has killed 80 people in China so far.
“There will certainly be an impact on our economy, business and
consumer confidence this year especially as the situation is expected to
persist for sometime,” Chan Chun Sing said.
Tourism-related sectors were of immediate concern and the government was ready to support firms and workers, he said.
Chinese nationals make up the largest share of visitors to Singapore,
one of the worst hit countries outside of China in the 2003 outbreak of
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-singapore/coronavirus-outbreak-will-hit-singapores-economy-this-year-trade-minister-idUSKBN1ZQ095?il=0
Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace said on Sunday that it has removed
sales of face masks from shops that show “unstable prices or false
advertising”, as prices for the products surged as Chinese consumers
race to protect themselves from the coronavirus outbreak.
The newly identified coronavirus has created alarm because much about
it is still unknown, such as how dangerous it is and how easily it
spreads between people. It can cause pneumonia, which has been deadly in
some cases.
U.S. S&P500 e-mini futures fell more than 1% in Asian trade on
Monday on mounting worries the new coronavirus outbreak could severely
disrupt the Chinese economy, an engine of global growth.
China’s cabinet said it would extend the week-long Lunar New Year
holiday by three days to Feb. 2 and Hong Kong banned residents of
China’s Hubei province, where the new coronavirus outbreak was first
reported, from entering the city.
Five people in the United States, all of whom recently traveled from
Wuhan, China, have been diagnosed with the new coronavirus, officials of
the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday.
The count includes new patients identified over the weekend in the
Los Angeles and Phoenix areas, as well as cases reported earlier in
Chicago and Seattle.
Another 25 people have tested negative for the illness, but at least
100 more possible cases are being investigated, Nancy Messonnier,
director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory
Diseases, said in a conference call with reporters.
She said to expect more cases to be reported in the United States in coming days.
Messonnier described the risk to health in the United States as “low
at this time” because all of the patients traveled from Wuhan. She said
there is no evidence in the United States of the disease spreading to
other people.
Health authorities around the world are racing to prevent a pandemic
after more than 2,000 people were infected in China and 56 have died
after contracting the virus.
The newly identified coronavirus has created alarm because there are a
still many important unknowns surrounding it. It can cause pneumonia,
which has been deadly in some cases. It is still too early to know just
how dangerous it is and how easily it spreads between people. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-usa-california/officials-confirm-five-u-s-cases-of-coronavirus-after-china-travel-idUSKBN1ZP0AA
Emerging data on the new virus circulating in China adds to evidence there is sustained human-to-human transmission in the city of Wuhan, and that a single case was able to ignite a chain of other infections.
The World Health Organization reported Thursday that there have been at least four generations of spread of the new virus, provisionally called 2019-nCoV, meaning a person who contracted the virus from a non-human source — presumably an animal — has infected a person, who infected another person, who then infected another person.
It’s not clear from a WHO statement whether transmission petered out after that point, or whether further generations of cases from those chains are still to come.
The WHO said the current estimate of the reproductive rate of the virus — the number of people, on average, that each infected person infects — is between 1.4 and 2.5. To stop an outbreak, the reproduction number has to be brought below one. A new virus has been causing respiratory illnesses in China. Officials are still unclear about how this one will spread between people. There are two ways this outbreak could pan out. Hyacinth Empinado/STAT“That gives me no comfort at all that anything that’s happening right now is going to bring this under control any time soon,” Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said of the data the WHO released.
“And I think that as long as the virus is circulating in China as it appears to be, the rest of the world is going to be constantly pinged with it, as a result of people traveling to and from China in the near future,” he said.
To date, nine other countries, including the United States, have diagnosed cases of this new illness in tourists who traveled to Wuhan or residents who returned from there.
Dr. Allison McGeer, who has firsthand experience with outbreaks caused by coronaviruses — the family to which 2019-nCoV belongs — also expressed concern about prospects for containing the outbreak.
McGeer, a researcher at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, noted that the city’s SARS outbreak took off when fourth-generation cases were infected in the city’s hospitals. McGeer contracted SARS during that outbreak.
The WHO released the information in a statement following a press conference during which Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the global health agency was not yet ready to declare the rapidly evolving outbreak in China a global health emergency.
The decision was based on advice from a committee of outside experts. That committee was effectively split about whether the outbreak constitutes what is known as a global health emergency of international concern.
“Make no mistake: This is an emergency in China. But it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one,’’ Tedros, as he is known, said.
China has effectively quarantined eight cities — home to tens of millions of people — to try to contain spread of the virus. The move comes as much of the country is traveling to be with family to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is Saturday. Guangdong province, which has reported rising numbers of cases, has declared a public health emergency.
China first informed the WHO of the outbreak on Dec. 31, and developments have been rapid in the just over three weeks since then. As of Thursday the global case count was approaching 600, with at least 17 deaths.
A University of Hong Kong study published in the online journal Eurosurveillance on Thursday said the emerging evidence points to sustained person-to-person spread of the virus in Wuhan.
The paper mapped out two possible scenarios of how the virus is spreading. The first involved many of the cases having been infected by exposure to as-yet unidentified animals; the second depicted a situation where some people were infected by animals in early December, with person-to-person spread accounting for the bulk of cases since.
The early evidence “was most consistent with limited human-to-human transmissibility, however more recent data seem to be increasingly more compatible with scenario 2 in which sustained human-to-human transmission has been occurring,” the team reported. The senior author of the paper was Gabriel Leung, dean of medicine at the university. https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/23/four-generations-of-spread-seen-with-virus-in-china-alarming-experts/
