News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Publicly posting the federal testing and enforcement data on meat, poultry, and egg product facilities could have important public health benefits, as long as the information is accurate, is easy to understand, and protects companies' proprietary information, according to a report today from the National Research Council (NRC).

(CIDRAP News) – US government laboratories had 395 incidents that involved the potential release of select agents between 2003 and 2009, though only seven related infections were reported, according to a new National Research Council (NRC) report.

(CIDRAP News) – A report from the National Research Council (NRC) calls for some changes in a US Army immunization program for lab researchers who work with dangerous pathogens, saying the vaccines need to be made more accessible to civilian scientists.

(CIDRAP News) – The National Research Council (NRC), in a letter report, has advised the US Army to prepare a more comprehensive risk assessment than it initially proposed for a biodefense laboratory to be built at Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Md.

(CIDRAP News) – Scientists who helped the FBI investigate the 2001 anthrax letter attacks today released the details of the genomic analysis that linked the anthrax used in the attacks to a flask in the custody of government scientist Bruce Ivins, who the FBI concluded was the perpetrator.

(CIDRAP News) – The National Research Council's (NRC's) report on the FBI's anthrax investigation amounts to a general endorsement of the agency's scientific approach, even though the NRC found that the purely scientific evidence on the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was not conclusive, a leading anthrax expert said today.

(CIDRAP News) – After a review of scientific methods that the FBI used in probing the 2001 anthrax mailings, a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) announced today that the available scientific evidence by itself is not adequate to reach a definitive conclusion about the source of the anthrax spores used in the attacks.