Recent News

By Region: North America

The Effect of Anti-lethal Toxin Antibodies on Anthrax Mortality

(Clinicians’ Biosecurity News) The traditional mortality from inhalational anthrax at the beginning of the 20th century was often reported as 90%, but it was 45% following the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. This marked reduction in mortality likely occurred because of improvements in the care of critically ill patients. That a high mortality rate persists despite  Read More »

NSABB member says officials stacked deck for board’s H5N1 decision

(CIDRAP News) In a leaked letter, a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has charged that federal officials planned the board’s meeting in late March in a way designed to lead the board to reverse its earlier recommendation against full publication of two studies describing lab-modified H5N1 viruses with increased transmissibility  Read More »

A Flawed Flu Papers Process?

(Science Now) Now one of the six dissenters, influenza epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has written a sharp critique of the meeting that led to the decision. In a letter sent yesterday to Amy Patterson, an official at the U.S. National Institutes of Health whose office oversees NSABB, Osterholm charged  Read More »

Bias accusation rattles US biosecurity board

(Nature.com) A closed meeting, convened last month by the US Government to decide the fate of two controversial unpublished papers on the H5N1 avian influenza virus was stacked in favour of their full publication, a participant now says. Michael Osterholm, who heads the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minneapolis,  Read More »

Can the US Afford a New Biodefense Lab?

(Science Now) The United States faces a stark choice between funding a new state-of-the-art laboratory for agricultural biodefense and paying for ongoing research on the topic, according to the government’s top biosecurity research official. “We are hard up against it now; you can’t do research without modern facilities, but the money for modern facilities comes  Read More »

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