Recent News

By Region: North America

Yellow fever outbreak kills 164 in Sudan’s Darfur: WHO

(Chicago Tribune) Yellow fever has killed 164 people over the last three months in Sudan’s Darfur, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, an arid region the size of Spain where fighting and banditry makes access particularly difficult. Healthcare is provided almost entirely by aid agencies in parts of Darfur, where rebels took up  Read More »

The role of the cellular entry point of anthrax identified

(Phys.org) A team led by Marcos Gonzalez-Gaitan, a professor at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, in collaboration with Gisou van der Goot at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), reveals that Antxr2a actually plays a role in embryonic development, orienting cell division along a specific plane, which is a prelude to the formation of  Read More »

US Plans for New H5N1 Science Reviews Ruffle Researchers

(AAAS) Researchers are giving mixed reviews to a draft U.S. government plan to subject some grant requests for studies involving the H5N1 avian influenza virus to special reviews—and perhaps even require the work to be kept secret. Elements of the plan have been “very controversial within [the] U.S. government” committee that developed it, Amy Patterson,  Read More »

Doomsday Microbes: Is Some Science Too Dangerous to Permit?

(Huffington Post) In Stephen King’s The Stand, Armageddon is born from a U.S. military bioweapons project to engineer a deadly form of the flu. The beginning chapters of the thriller predictably tell the story of the virus’ escape and epidemic rampage through the world, killing most of the human population. While the remainder of the  Read More »

CIA Sued Over Alledged 1953 Murder of Military Scientist

(Bloomberg) Employees of the Central Intelligence Agency murdered military scientist Frank Olson in 1953 after he raised concerns about testing chemical and biological weapons on human subjects without their consent, according to a lawsuit brought by his two sons. Eric and Nils Olson, in a complaint filed against the U.S. today in Washington, said the  Read More »