News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Though the United States observed the fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks this fall, the nation's public health emergency preparedness has improved slowly and remains inadequate, according to a report last week from the nonprofit organization Trust for America's Health (TFAH).

(CIDRAP News) – Soon after the terrorist attacks of 2001, Congress approved emergency funds to teach hospital staffs how to recognize and respond to bioterrorism attacks, and today the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its first report on those efforts.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization reported last week that 42 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) died recently of suspected pneumonic plague.

The outbreaks, which include 626 suspected cases, occurred between Jul 31 and Oct 8 in two health zones in the Haut-Uele district, most of them in the Wamba zone of Oriental province in the northern part of the country.

(CIDRAP News) – The medical aid group Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) appealed for help last week in the fight to control the outbreak of pneumonic plague in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

(CIDRAP News) – One hundred people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) of suspected pneumonic plague, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

Nineteen of the deaths occurred in Ituri district in the northeastern Oriental province, a plague hotbed, according to the WHO.

(CIDRAP News) – If public health emergency preparedness were a college class, the federal government would be considered a poor pupil by the nonprofit organization Trust For America's Health (TFAH), which gives the government a D+ in a new report released yesterday.

That grade was based on a survey of 20 leading public health experts, who used 12 criteria to measure preparedness.

(CIDRAP News) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently reconstructed the 1918 pandemic influenza virus for research purposes, has classified the virus as a "select agent," imposing special rules on groups that handle it.

(CIDRAP News) – Hospital residents did poorly on a test of their ability to recognize and manage diseases potentially related to bioterrorism, but they fared much better after taking an online training program, according to a report in Archives of Internal Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – Amid the devastation left by hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf Coast, fears of infectious disease outbreaks have added to the distress. Some of those concerns are solidly grounded, while others are less so, disease experts say.

(CIDRAP News) – Two research reports on plague were recently released, one describing the mechanism that the plague bacterium uses to evade the body's immune system and the other describing a potential vaccine that was tested successfully in mice.