News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – An independent board that advises the US Department of Defense on science and technology issues issued a report on Election Day highlighting a range of priorities for the incoming Obama administration, including measures to prevent and respond to a bioterrorist attack.

(CIDRAP News) – Two organizations recently reported winning US government contracts for research on drugs that could work against multiple bioterror-related diseases such as plague, tularemia, and anthrax.

(CIDRAP News) – Emergent BioSolutions Inc. recently announced that it won a federal contract worth $24.3 million to develop a monoclonal antibody treatment to block the effects of anthrax toxin.

(CIDRAP News) – The president of the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) complained to Congress last week that the federal program that monitors the air for dangerous pathogens in major cities is a heavy burden on state and local laboratories.

(CIDRAP News) – The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently released a guide to help communities retool their health-related call centers into systems for meeting the needs of the public in homes or shelters during emergencies such as a pandemic or bioterrorist attack.

(CIDRAP News) – The US government recently awarded contracts totaling about $34 million to two companies for development of drugs to treat pneumonic plague, tularemia, and anthrax, three of the diseases terrorists are deemed most likely to try to exploit.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – Ten years after H5N1 avian influenza first began to raise fears of a potential pandemic, the world has a stronger set of tools to contain that virus and similar threats, but also a fresh awareness of humanity's vulnerability to fast-spreading diseases, experts said yesterday at an international conference on flu.

(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.

March 30, 2007 (CIDRAP News) – Genetic elements that confer multidrug resistance (MDR) in both plague and foodborne bacteria have a common origin and may represent a significant public health threat, according to a study published Mar 20 in the journal PLoS One (Public Library of Science One).

(CIDRAP News) – A new analysis of research into the 1918 influenza pandemic, undertaken to determine whether historical accounts can illuminate planning for possible future pandemics, reveals a surprising number of enduring mysteries.