Recent News

By Region: North America

Lawmakers want CDC info on bioterror lab

(USA TODAY) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering having U.S. Army scientists or another outside agency inspect its bioterror labs in the wake of a USA TODAY report this month. The agency plans to install safety equipment to address fire code violations from December 2010 that could trap workers in an emergency,  Read More »

Anthrax Vaccine Distribution Recommendations Approach Completion

(Global Security Newswire) Recommendations are nearing completion to aid U.S. authorities in determining the order in which potential victims of an aerosolized anthrax attack receive vaccinations, an advisory body for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. The CDC Immunization Practices Advisory Committee would provide the finished recommendations to U.S. government personnel  Read More »

FMD-outbreak scenario presented at Expo

(Iowa Farmer Today) DES MOINES — Thinking about the consequences of a foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in the United States is not pleasant, says Dermot Hayes. But, the Iowa State University ag economist says it is something that has to be considered as other nations deal with the disease. Hayes worked with several other economists  Read More »

Debate over H5N1 fatality rate flares again

(CIDRAP News) In the latest chapter in an ongoing debate over the true case-fatality ratio (CFR) for human H5N1 influenza infections, a group of leading flu experts has written a Science article rejecting the idea that millions of H5N1 infections have gone undetected. The debate was sparked by the controversy over publication of two studies  Read More »

H5N1: What kind of oversight is best for bird flu research?

(Los Angeles Times) The upshot of months of controversy over whether to publish research that used the H5N1 avian flu virus — experiments in which scientists engineered forms of the bug that could spread through the air to infect mammals — was that scientists got to publish their work in full in a special issue  Read More »