The best and worst of the world's eats

 Sudanese refugee mother has a daily struggle to feed her children in the Birak refugee camp, Chad. Photo by Cynthia Jones/World Food Program via Getty Images.

Fit, healthy Australians. Sleek, cycling Dutch. Icelanders living on dried fish.

Not so much, says a new survey, Good Enough to Eat, released Wednesday by Oxfam, compiled from data gathered by international organizations.

 It’s a global food index that weighs the most important factors of dietary health, including affordability, quantity, diversity and nutritiousness of food, as well as a country’s rate of obesity and diabetes. And it has turned up some surprising results.

Where's the best place to eat?

The Netherlands. And the much-touted French and Swiss come in second.

Canada ranks only 25th of 125 countries, thanks to growing obesity and “unhealthy eating.”

The problem is more than a plethora of poutine. “Even in a wealthy country like Canada there’s a big gap between what people need and what they get,” says Oxfam Canada’s Robert Fox, pointing out that aboriginal communities suffer most, and in Nunavut more than half of children live in food insecurity. Fox calls for a “national food policy” in Canada, and an overseas aid policy  that is focused on women food producers.

But food problems are often complex, the report points out.

While the Dutch have the highest overall rating  – and a well-known fondness for riding bicycles – they score lower on the obesity measure, with 19 per cent of people surveyed classed as fat. (Too many Dutch treats?)

Even worse is Australia, whose svelte beach bunny image is blown away by an obesity rate of 27 per cent. And 9 per cent of Australians also have diabetes.

At the very bottom of the unhealthy eating scale, strangely, are wealthy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which rate an “F” for obesity and diabetes.

Icelanders, not noted for grand cuisine, rate at the top of the food quality and diet diversity scale, in spite of their limited farm land and relatively high food prices.

But sadly, it’s all too easy to predict those at the bottom end of the index.

Impoverished Chad – home to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees – is lowest overall, with food that’s too little and too dear. It also has scant nutritional value, and is kept in unsanitary conditions. One child in three is underweight. 

Meanwhile Angola, also near the bottom of the scale, suffers the highest level of food price volatility, except for inflation-battered Zimbabwe. In Angola, “60 per cent of people’s diet is made up of simple carbohydrates and almost half the population do not have access to clean water” to prepare food safely.

In Burundi, a whopping 67 per cent of people are undernourished, and 35 per cent of children are underweight. A number of other African countries have scores that are little better.

One surprise: the worst score for underweight children is in “Asian tiger” India –  some  44 per cent of kids have lower than normal weight, making them vulnerable to stunting and learning disabilities.

“Inequality, weak distribution, failed markets and poor governance mean that people in many countries go to bed hungry, especially women,” says Oxfam, calling for “urgent reform of the way food is produced and distributed around the world to put an end to this scandal.”

Olivia Ward has covered countries from the former Soviet Union, Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

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MERS: Oman's first infection and more cases in Saudi Arabia

A Muslim pilgrim performing evening prayers in Mecca's Grand Mosque during this year's hajj pilgrimage. Health officials in Saudi Arabia have been on high alert amid growing concerns over the deadly MERS coronavirus.                                                                                                    (Fayez Nureldine/AFP)

Oman is now the latest country to join the list of nations impacted by the coronavirus that causes MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome.

In a press release Thursday, the World Health Organization announced Oman's first laboratory-confirmed case of MERS, along with three new cases in Saudi Arabia.

The Omani patient is a 68-year-old man from the Al Dahkliya region who became sick on Saturday and was in hospital by Monday. So far, it does not seem as though he has recently travelled outside of the country.

The three Saudi cases - two men and a woman, one of them a health care worker - are between 49 and 83 and all had underlying medical conditions. None appear to have had any contact with animals, but health officials are still looking into it.

The WHO says it has now recorded 149 MERS cases, confirmed by lab testing, 63 of which were fatal. There are likely even more cases, however, if you include those where lab confirmations weren't possible. An excellent list can be found here at FluTrackers, an online community of people interested in infectious disease news.

And like every MERS update, this one doesn't answer the biggest question of all: what is the source of MERS and how are people getting infected? The likeliest animal source is still probably the bat (which, as of yesterday, is a proven source of coronaviruses) - but how the virus is getting from these animals into humans is still anyone's guess.

Jennifer Yang is the Star’s global health reporter. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar



The link between this Egyptian tomb bat and the Middle East respiratory syndrome

A scientist holds an Egyptian tomb bat. Credit: Jonathan Epstein, EcoHealth Alliance 

If this were an Indiana Jones movie, the plot would go something like this: a winged creature escapes from an ancient Egyptian tomb and unleashes a deadly evil across the land that leaves people sick and dying in its wake.

But when it comes to the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, fact might not be that far off from fiction – just subtract the supernatural stuff and throw in the findings from a new paper published today in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

The coronavirus that causes MERS has now sickened nearly 100 people and killed at least 46 but scientists are still scratching their heads over how it is infecting people. A crucial first step towards answering this mystery is finding the animal – or animals – harbouring the virus, which comes from the same viral family as SARS.

So far, scientists have found clues suggesting bats and camels but this new study is the first to actually find the virus in an animal: the Egyptian tomb bat.

"We're really excited; it's a major breakthrough for us," says disease ecologist Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and one of the authors on the paper. "We've been looking at this for a year now and we've finally been able to get good evidence."

The discovery is the result of a collaboration between EcoHealth, Saudi Arabian scientists and renowned "microbe hunter" Dr. Ian Lipkin and his team at Columbia University.

Most MERS cases have been in Saudi Arabia so the team traveled there last October and this past April, trapping 96 bats and collecting fecal samples from hundreds of others.

Only one bat had any trace of MERS, however – an Egyptian tomb bat from Bisha, the town where Saudi Arabia's first MERS victim lived and worked.

The scientists did not find live virus, nor did they find an entire coronavirus – just a snippet of one. Nonetheless, that viral fragment showed a 100 per cent genetic match for the MERS coronavirus found in the Bisha man who died in June 2012.

"The fact that it's just a snippet of the virus is frustrating but we're pretty confidant this is the reservoir," Daszak says. "It’s not just the fact that it’s 100 per cent (genetically matched), it’s also the fact that there are mechanisms for how the virus could get into people. These bats roost in abandoned buildings and in houses; they come close to humans."

The paper does not exclude the possibility that another animal could be acting as the intermediary between bats and humans; Lipkin and his team at Columbia are also now testing for MERS in 130 samples taken from Saudi Arabian livestock.

But Daszak has a hunch that the coronavirus is probably getting into people the same way something like Hantavirus does.

"You've got bat feces on the ground, it's dusty and you breathe it in," he says, noting that coronaviruses cause respiratory disease in humans. "It's the exact same mechanism that causes Hantavirus in humans."

Daszak believes it is important to find the animal host because then health authorities can take concrete steps to minimize contact between the MERS source and human populations. It can also help them identify those who are most at risk (for example, people who work in areas where these bats like to roost) and boost disease surveillance in other parts of the world where Egyptian tomb bats are known to live.

But Daszak thinks the discovery also underscores a bigger issue: that more and more wildlife viruses are now showing up in people, largely as a result of human activity bringing us into closer contact with new animals and pathogens.

"This isn’t all about bats carrying nasty viruses," he says. "The real issue is what we do in the environment that brings us into contact with these viruses. And if we can modify how we work in the environment – and be less intrusive and more clever about the way we develop agriculture and other things – we should be able to avoid these problems."

Jennifer Yang is the Star’s global health reporter. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar

"Girls married 60 times before 18" - Egypt's Child Sex Tourism

 

YouTube video from the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood promotes women's political rights in Egypt. The NCCM says women's inequality is reflected in sham marriages for teenage girls that  are a form of child prostitution.

 

As if we needed more discouraging news out of the turmoil in Egypt, a shocking report says that thousands of teenage girls are being sold by their parents to wealthy Arab male tourists under the pretext of marriage in a barely-disguised form of child prostitution.

 “The sham nuptials may last from a couple of hours to years,” says a story entitled "Underage Girls are Egypt's Summer Rentals" by Cam McGrath from the Inter Press Service News Agency. 

“It’s a form of child prostitution in the guise of marriage,” Azza El-Ashmawy, director of the Child Anti-Trafficking Unit at the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood told the IPS.

“Some girls have been married 60 times by the time they turn 18," she said. " Most ‘marriages’ last for just a couple of days or weeks.”

McGrath explains that temporary marriages allow the male buyers to get around Islamic restrictions on pre-marital sex.

He reports that the trade has increased since Egypt’s 2011 revolution ushered in a period of economic collapse along with crumbling law enforcement.

McGrath describes the scene in  El Hawamdia, an impoverished town 20 kilometres outside of Cairo.

Well-dressed Arab men "troll the town’s pot-holed, garbage-strewn streets in their luxury cars and SUVs" as "fixers" run alongside offering them apartments -- and underage girls -- for rent.  

A NCCM survey of 2,000 families in three towns near Cairo  found that "the hefty sums paid by Arab tourists was the main motive for the high rate" of so-called “summer marriages” in these areas.

Three-quarters of the respondents said that they knew girls involved in the trade and that the number of marriages was increasing.

According to the survey, more than 80 percent of the male “spouses” were from Saudi Arabia, 10 percent from the United Arab Emirates, and four percent from Kuwait.

The IPS story says that since sexual relations with minors is illegal in Egypt, brokers forge birth certificates or substitute the identity card of a girl’s older sister.

 It says a "pleasure” marriage can be arranged for as little as 800 Egyptian pounds (about $120 Canadian dollars). 

Sandy Shinouda with the Counter-Trafficking Unit of the  International Organisation of Migration in Cairo told IPS that  most of the young girls come from large families for whom marriage to a wealthier foreigner offers an escape from poverty.

"The family considers her as a commodity,” she told the IPS. “The girls know their families have exploited them…they can understand that their parents sold them.” 

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Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and invetsigative reporter for the Star and be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher.

 

 

 

Al Qaeda's Conference Call

So why did Canada close its diplomatic mission in Bangladesh Sunday, or the U.S. Air Force evacuate Americans from Sanaa, Yemen at dawn Tuesday, or why did the U.S. State Department issue a worldwide travel alert for the month of August?

Apparently, according to the Daily Beast, Al Qaeda had a conference call.

That's what three unnamed U.S. officials told Eli Lake and Josh Rogin. "This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one intelligence officers said in the story posted online Wednesday, referring to the coalition of villains featured in the Saturday morning cartoon Super Friends.

Those on the call included, "representatives or leaders from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more obscure al Qaeda affiliates such as the Uzbekistan branch. Also on the call were representatives of aspiring al Qaeda affiliates such as al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula," the story stated.

This assertion is remarkable for a number of reasons.

First, the upper echelon of Al Qaeda is skilled at avoiding detection and the idea that up to 20 leaders of the group would participate on what was described as a "conference call" seems fantastic.

Second, the list of so-called "Super Friends" is also curious. While there are known ties between Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Al Qaeda's branches in Yemen or Iraq, including members from Uzbekistan or Sinai or Nigeria on what was purportedly a high-level strategy session seems reckless for a group that is anything but reckless.

Third, one of the officials told the Daily Beast: "All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down to get a sense of who was on the phone call." But the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria did not close this week? And why are the embassies in Kigali, Rwanda, and Antananarivo, Madagascar still shut while the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan re-opened?

Even before the story of the conference call was posted, McClatchy journalist Hannah Allam had gathered an amusing assortment of comments from Washington's counterterrorism analysts, who remain baffled by the extreme security measures.

Top prize goes to former State Department adviser Will McCants, who recently joined the Brookings Saban Center. "It's crazy pants," he said. "You can quote me."

Meanwhile, news seems to be breaking by the hour in Yemen, where Yemenis are also perplexed by the fuss, analyst Abdul Ghani al-Iryani told me in an interview Tuesday. "It’s puzzling to me," he said. "The heightened threat is to be expected because the drones were very busy in the past few days and have killed quite a few of the top leadership of the AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) but we have not seen anything like this. I don’t know why they felt they had to go to these extremes. The Yemenis are not paying attention to it at all. For us it’s just weird Americans do weird things, basically."

Although the alerts started Friday, one Western intelligence official told me the risk is expected to rise following the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which ends tonight.

Much more of this story to come.

 

(For a backgrounder on AQAP, here's one I wrote for TNR a couple years ago - as a primer it's still relevant: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/al-qaeda-the-arab-peninsula-primer#. For on-the-ground reporting in Sanaa, follow on Twitter: Iona Craig, Khaled al-Hammadi, Nasser Arrabyee , Adam Baron and Casey Coombs. Great analysis always from Gregory Johnsen.)

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/06/198681/broad-us-terror-alert-mystifies.html#.UgJDMJFE3Fr#storylink=cpy

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

The coronavirus in the Middle East: will Hajj pilgrims bring it home?

Source: Potential for the International Spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Association with Mass Gatherings in Saudi Arabia/PLOS Currents Outbreaks

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization announced that MERS -- the new coronavirus in the Middle East -- is not yet considered a public health emergency.

But emergency or not, the situation is a serious one. To date, MERS has infected 88 people and killed 45 people -- some of whom have brought the virus to Europe and Africa.

Thus far, all confirmed cases can be traced back to one of four Middle Eastern countries: Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. But the majority of cases have occurred in Saudi Arabia -- the same country millions of pilgrims are now flocking to for Hajj and Umrah.

As Mecca enters its peak season for pilgrimages, there is a growing worry that visitors could get infected and scatter back to their home countries, bringing the virus with them.

But which countries are most at risk? This is the question a team of researchers -- led by Dr. Kamran Khan, a St. Michael's Hospital doctor and founder of BioDiaspora -- wanted to answer with their new study, published Wednesday in PLOS Currents Outbreaks.

The team used a web-based technology that analyzes global air traffic patterns to predict the spread of infectious diseases.

And their results are not exactly reassuring. According to a press release about the study, MERS "could spread faster and wider during two international mass gatherings involving millions of people in the next few months."

Analyzing 2012 data, the researchers found that 16.8 million travelers flew on commercial airlines out of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates between June (one month pre-Ramadan) and November (one month post-Hajj).

During SARS, which killed some 800 people worldwide, the majority of infected travelers turned up in high-income countries, including Canada. But with Hajj, there were 1.74 million pilgrims last year and an estimated 65.1 per cent flew home to low or low-middle income countries, according to the study.

Nearly one in four Hajj pilgrims flew to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Nepal -- countries that spend $59, $30, $56 and $33 US per capita on health care, respectively. For comparison's sake, Canada's health expenditures per capita is $5,630 US, or $5,837 CAD.

"Given that these countries have limited resources, they may have difficulty quickly identifying imported MERS cases, implementing rigorous infection control precautions and responding effectively to newly introduced cases," Khan said in the press release.

Khan and his team also found that eight countries supply the majority (51.6 per cent) of Mecca's pilgrims: India (16.3 per cent), Egypt (10.4), Pakistan (7.8), Britain (4.3), Kuwait (3.6), Bangladesh (3.1), Iran (3.1) and Bahrain (2.9). Twelve cities also received more than 350,000 commercial air travelers from the four Middle Eastern countries affected by MERS (Cairo, Kuwait City, London, Bahrain, Beirut, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachi, Manila, Kozhikode (India), Istanbul and Jakarta).

In the press release, Khan and his team urge health care providers to learn from SARS; we should anticipate a wider MERS outbreak, they say, rather than react to one after it happens.

Sounds like good advice.

Jennifer Yang is the Star’s global health reporter. She previously worked as a general assignment reporter and won a NNA in 2011 for her explanatory piece on the Chilean mining disaster. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar

Al Qaeda leader in Yemen dead, again

Said Ali al-Shihri is dead. Killed by a drone in Yemen.

Probably.

Skepticism is necessary, since al-Shihri, the Saudi deputy commander of Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has been reported dead before. Or as Mark Twain would say, reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.

But this time, the death was confirmed by AQAP, which may be as good as it gets. Ibrahim al-Rubaish, one of AQAP's leaders, eulogized Shihri in a video posted online Wednesday, saying that he died in a U.S. drone strike, tracked because of "lax security measures during his telephone contacts (that) enabled the enemy to kill him."

Shihri's death is significant for a number of reason, but the confusion about his fate may also be telling. Gregory Johnsen, author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia, says while this strike may have indeed killed Shihri, the previous false claims points to greater questions about the Obama administration's drone program. "The reason he has been reported dead so many times gets to the achilles heel of the U.S. in a place like Yemen: on-the-ground intelligence," Johnsen said Wednesday. "The U.S. simply doesn't have it, which means it often doesn't know who it kills. And so sometimes it thinks it kills someone, only to have them turn up later very much alive. This happened to Shihri at least 4 times."

Shihri was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and spent six years detained in Guantanamo Bay before his 2007 release into a Saudi rehabilitation program. He helped merge Al Qaeda's Saudi and Yemeni branches in early 2009 to form AQAP - much to the embarrassment of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. as both had praised the Jeddah-based reintegration program for jihadis. 

Washington considers AQAP its greatest threat and Shihri, who fought in Chechnya and Afghanistan, has been tracked for years. His death is sure to impact the organization, although Johnsen, and other counterterrorism analysts have noted, AQAP is a decentralized group and can sustain the loss of its leaders.

Michelle Shephard is the Toronto Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recepient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

The Arab uprisings? We're feeling good about it, survey says

Arabs are feeling good about their revolutions, they believe in democracy and would like to keep religion separate from politics.

Those are the surprising results of a new public opinion survey of 20,350 Arab citizens conducted in countries that have seen change and upheaval which, transmitted half a world away to us, seem overwhelmingly negative. The uncertainty in Egypt, carnage in Syria and militias dominating Libya, to name a few.

But in 14 countries including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Libya, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, people are much more optimistic, according to the report by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, a think tank in Qatar.

A resounding 61 per cent of respondents described the Arab Spring as “positive” or “positive to some extent.”

When asked if the revolutions have been successful in achieving goals of securing human rights, laying the foundations for democracy and public liberties, 20 per cent said it has already achieved its aims. (Which admittedly may be a little too optimistic.) Another 26 per cent said these changes will be achieved in the next 1 to 3 years.

Syrians were not included in this survey - their responses would certainly skew the results - but 66 per cent of their brethren in the region were in favour of regime change in Syria. 

There has been a lot of concern about the rising tide of political Islam in places such as Egypt and Tunisia. However, 82 per cent of respondents said a democratic political system, not Sharia-based system, is appropriate for their home countries. When asked whether they supported the statement "It would be better if religion were separated from politics" 46 per cent agreed. 

Which goes to show there is a vast gap between what ordinary people in the Arab world want and expect, what their rulers say, and what we in the English-speaking democracies believe them to want. 

Some fine print: Respondents were selected through a randomized, sampling process and interviewed face to face from July 2012 to March 2013. Margins of error ranged between two per cent and three per cent. 

READ MORE: The Toronto Star's Middle East coverage

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at The Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

Driving mad: The world's most dangerous roads

Afraid of flying? Terrorist attacks? The thief lurking under your bed? Well, you should actually be afraid of driving. Especially if you live in, say, the Dominican Republic.

The World Health Organization has a released report on the world's most dangerous roads, taking into account the number of motor vehicle-related deaths per 100,000 people. Top of the list is Dominican Republic, followed by Thailand, Venezuela and Iran. Safest? Iceland.

Max Fisher, a Foreign Affairs blogger at the Washington Post, notes that there is no single thread that joining the most dangerous countries, but medical care "both in terms of its quality and the physical nearness of hospitals seems to play a major role." 

Ask any foreign correspondent to share their scariest moments and a driving story is bound to be among the top five. Kenya's roads frighten me. Photographer Lucas Oleniuk says he has never felt closer to death (keep in mind he has been shot at in Bahrain and Haiti, among other locales) than when we tracked a shipment of khat, a popular leafy stimulant, from the trees in Maua, Kenya, to a parking lot north of Toronto last year.

 

You'll see the insanity of khat "drivers" at the end of his video here:

 

My colleague Hamida Ghafour, who was a recent resident in the United Arab Emirates, was dismayed the UAE didn't make the WHO's top 10 list. She writes:

Could the United Arab Emirates’ infamous Sheikh Zayed, which links Dubai and Abu Dhabi, really not be the worst highway in the world? I spent nearly two years commuting on that six-lane highway, trying to share the road with the Maseratis, Rolls Royces, and Lamborghinis favoured by Emiratis. (For the record I was in a modest Volvo.) 

Swapping horror stories about surviving the Sheikh Zayed was a dinner party perennial, kind of like moaning about property prices in Toronto. My favourite was a near miss with a South Asian driver who was driving erratically in the lane next to me one late Thursday afternoon as I headed home to Dubai.  I thought he was drunk until I looked closer – he was holding the Qur'an in one hand and reading it, while holding the steering wheel with the other.

The Sheikh Zayed also represents the tragic equalities in that society. The camps where the poor South Asian labourers who work mostly on construction sites lived were situated in the desert, cut off from population centres. If they missed the last bus home the only way back was crossing the Sheikh Zayed, which is like trying to dart across the 401. The worst hazard was anxiously watching for day labourers on that highway. On two occasions I saw the bodies of two men lying on the hard shoulder, covered with white sheets.

Somalia didn't participate in the WHO survey and driving conditions are likely pretty low on the country's To Do list. Here's a glimpse of what driving Mogadishu is like. (Videographer Randy Risling just let the GoPro on our car roll in 2011 and cut this oddly mesmerizing video):

 

Here's another fun video in case you wondered what Yemen's "streets" look like in the rainy season? Maybe not dangerous, but a rather damp experience. Star photojournalist (full disclosure: and husband) Jim Rankin cut this from our rather rainy reporting trip last year:

 

With apologies to Max Fisher for ending this blog the same way he ended his, here's the driving video everyone has been talking about since it was uploaded on YouTube May 31. It's reportedly from Makkah Road in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and features a very interesting Ford Crown Victoria hood ornament:

 

 

Michelle Shephard is the Star's National Security correspondent and author of "Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone." She is a three-time recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award. Follow her on Twitter @shephardm

White House: new coronavirus could become a public health emergency

Could the new coronavirus trigger a public health emergency in the United States? The White House believes the answer is yes and the Obama administration has given the virus an emergency designation to fast-track the approval process for new drugs and tests.

In a May 29 statement, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services said the new coronavirus has "significant potential" to become a public health emergency.

The virus, which is now being called MERS, has thus far infected 54 people and killed 30 since first emerging in April 2012. Earlier today, the World Health Organization announced that the latest victim is a 14-year-old girl from the eastern region of Saudi Arabia. She is currently in stable condition.

The White House also gave an emergency designation to H7N9 earlier this year, a deadly new bird flu that first popped up in China this March. The designation was used in 2009 as well for H1N1 and "inspired more than 15 product approvals," according to The Hill's health care blog.

The emergency use designation gives the US Food and Drug Adminstration the authority to bypass normal regulatory procedures (which can be time-consuming and cumbersome) and quickly approve new drugs and tests for American citizens.

The FDA can revoke this emergency use application at any time. The designation also does not mean that an emergency is already here, a US Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson pointed out to CIDRAP news – rather, it's just the prudent thing to do in preparation for a worst-case scenario.

"The declaration was a necessary first step in the legal and regulatory process to allow FDA to issue an emergency use authorization for the use of new laboratory diagnostic test kits designed to detect the novel coronavirus," the spokesperson told CIDRAP news in an email.

Jennifer Yang is the Star’s global health reporter. She previously worked as a general assignment reporter and won a NNA in 2011 for her explanatory piece on the Chilean mining disaster. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar