All public swimming pools must be registered with the Subsurface Wastewater Program, including those associated with day care facilities.
When submitting an application for review of a public swimming pool to the Division of Environmental Health, the applicant and/or designer must include the following for a complete application:
The 2024-2025 influenza season has been particularly active. Health care facilities are seeing an increased number of individuals for testing, which is resulting in a dramatic increase in test specimens sent to Maine's Health and Environmental Testing Laboratory (HETL) for subtyping and reported to the Maine CDC. To reduce the testing volume at HETL, the Maine CDC is making changes to submission and reporting requests.
Please review this information from the U.S. CDC on the Ebola outbreak caused by Sudan virus (Orthoebolavirus sudanense) in Uganda and the federal response to it. As of February 10, 2025, there are no known cases of Ebola in Maine or elsewhere in the United States.
The Maine CDC is excited to announce that we are modernizing our Tuberculosis (TB) reporting system.
Currently, inactive TB (also known as Latent TB Infection or LTBI) cases and suspect and confirmed active TB cases are reported through a combination of faxed referral forms and phone calls. The new system is an online form that can be used to report inactive TB cases and suspect and confirmed active TB cases.
Please take a moment to review this information on accelerating subtyping of influenza A in hospitalized patients in the U.S.
To date, no human cases of H5N1 have been detected in Maine. Risk to the general public remains low. People with job- or recreation-related exposures to infected animals are at increased risk of H5N1 infection, especially when those exposures happen without use of appropriate personal protective equipment.
U.S. CDC has announced the first severe case of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) (also called HPAI, avian influenza, or bird flu) in the country, discovered in Louisiana, and another severe case was recently reported in Canada. There have been no known human cases of avian influenza A(H5N1) in Maine. Human and animal exposures to and infection with avian influenza remains a possibility.
Please take a moment to review this information from U.S. CDC on the first detection of clade I mpox in the United States. Maine has not detected any cases of clade I mpox.
This week Maine CDC reported a human case of Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) in a Penobscot County resident. This is the first human EEE case reported in Maine since 2015. The purpose of this health advisory is to remind clinicians to consider testing for mosquito-borne arboviruses in patients presenting with unexplained flu-like symptoms, encephalitis, aseptic meningitis, or high fever. In Maine, mosquitoes can spread EEE, Jamestown Canyon virus (JCV), and West Nile virus (WNV).
Influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are three viral respiratory infections that cause most respiratory-related hospitalizations and deaths in our communities. Influenza and RSV cause seasonal epidemics with timing that varies year to year; COVID-19 burden continues to rise and fall with no seasonality. U.S. CDC anticipates that the upcoming fall and winter respiratory disease season will likely have a similar or lower number of combined peak hospitalizations due to COVID-19, influenza, and RSV compared to last season.
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC) reports 101 pertussis cases between January 1 and October 23, 2024. This surpasses the 76 cases reported throughout all of 2023. Ages ranged from 1 month to 55 years old. Teenagers (13-19 years old) accounted for 43% of cases. Children under 5 years old accounted for 26% of cases.
This increase in cases is not exclusive to Maine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. CDC) shared that more than 5 times as many cases had been reported nationally as of October 19, compared to the same time in 2023.
