Recent News

By Region: North America

Biosafety concerns for labs in the developing world

(Nature.com) Biocontainment labs across the Asia-Pacific region all too often fail to live up to the term. An inspection of dozens of labs has found that nearly one-third of the biosafety hoods intended to protect workers from deadly pathogens did not work properly — an offence for which a Western lab could be shut down. Read More »

May 23, 2012
| Filed under Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North America, South America, South Asia, Biosafety, International, and Research
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US Government Supports Phase 3 Study of Bavarian Nordic’s Smallpox Vaccine

(Press Release) Bavarian Nordic announced today that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has supported the initiation of an expanded Phase 3 study of IMVAMUNE® smallpox vaccine. The government is stockpiling 20 million doses of IMVAMUNE® under a Project BioShield contract for use in a potential smallpox emergency. The company’s procurement contract was Read More »

May 23, 2012
| Filed under North America, Biotechnology, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, and Research
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Pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccination produces antibodies against multiple flu strains

(Emory University) The pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccine can generate antibodies in vaccinated individuals not only against the H1N1 virus, but also against other influenza virus strains including H5N1 and H3N2. This discovery adds an important new dimension to the finding last year that people infected with pandemic 2009 H1N1 virus produced high levels of antibodies Read More »

May 23, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Countermeasures, and Public Health
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Carl Zimmer: Curing our Influenza Amnesia

(World Science Festival) Our brains are not the only places where we can store memories. Each time a new pathogen invades our bodies, our immune cells have an opportunity to recognize it by some feature, usually some distinctive cleft or spike of a protein on its surface. After our bodies defeat the infection, some immune Read More »

May 22, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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Mad Cow: No Problems Found in Feed Records

(Food Safety News) Investigators found no irregularities in the feed records at the California dairy where a 10-year-old cow last month was confirmed to have had bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease), the U.S. Department of Agriculture stated in a follow-up report this week. The May 15 report to the World Organization for Read More »