News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – With tougher security requirements set to take effect next April, few state public health laboratories plan to maintain stocks of certain pathogens considered most tempting to bioterrorists, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) and officials with state labs.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials are inviting the public to weigh in on whether research on H5N1 avian influenza viruses, including strains modified in the lab to make them more transmissible, is risky enough to require new safety regulations and precautions.

(CIDRAP News) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has revised its list of potentially dangerous biological agents and toxins and the regulations covering them, and some of the changes have public health laboratories concerned.

(CIDRAP News) – A federal advisory committee is recommending that 11 bacterial species and viruses on the current "select agent" list, including anthrax and Ebola virus, be singled out for special safeguards and that another 19 agents be dropped from the list entirely.

(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) – The US government needs much closer collaboration with private industry—like the arrangements used in building aircraft carriers and putting men on the moon—in order to improve the nation's medical defenses against biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear threats, says a report from a federal advisory panel.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently unveiled its plan for developing and buying medical countermeasures against a range of biological, chemical, and other threats, with new anthrax and smallpox vaccines among the near-term priorities.

(CIDRAP News) – The plot of the world's latest pneumonic plague outbreak echoes with history.

Like a 19th-century American gold rush, news of the discovery of diamonds in a remote northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in November 2004 sparked an influx of adventurers hoping to strike it rich.