Recent News

By Region: North America

India takes the chair, to guide world on biosafety

(Deccan Chronicle) ndia formally took over the reins of conserving the world’s biological diversity on Monday, with a call to nations to speed up the process of ratifying the Cartagena Protocol on bio-safety and sustainable use of biological resources. The change in guard took place at the start of the three-week Conference of Parties (COP-11) Read More »

October 2, 2012
| Filed under Asia/Pacific, North America, Biosafety, International, and Policy & Initiatives
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DTRA Seeks Next Generation Sequencing for Biothreat Agents

(Global Biodefense) The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has issued a Request for Information to identify sources with the capability to amplify, sequence, and assemble sequence data for biothreat agents into high-quality genomes. The Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) effort is specifically looking to identify sources that can perform these pathogen characterization tasks for a large Read More »

October 2, 2012
| Filed under North America, Biological Weapons, Countermeasures, and Research
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New pathogen epidemic identified in sub-Saharan Africa

(EurekAlert) A new study out today reveals that the emergence and spread of a rapidly evolving invasive intestinal disease, that has a significant mortality rate (up to 45%) in infected people in sub-Saharan Africa, seems to have been potentiated by the HIV epidemic in Africa. The team found that invasive non-Typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) disease is Read More »

October 1, 2012
| Filed under North America and Agents & Toxins
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Talk on biosafety of GM organisms

(Deccan Chronicle) The inaugural session of Meeting of Parties (MoP) to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety will be held at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre here on Monday. There will be deliberations on the safe usage of genetically modified organisms for the benefit of humanity. The Cartagena Protocol, which came into force in September 2003, Read More »

October 1, 2012
| Filed under Asia/Pacific, Europe, North America, Biosafety, and International
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Researchers find novel hemorrhagic fever virus in Africa

(CIDRAP) Researchers have identified a new virus that can cause hemorrhagic fever in humans, based on their investigation of an unusual outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2009 that sickened three people, killing two. The analysis of a virus from the surviving patient—a nurse who cared for the two children who died—revealed Read More »