News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally stated yesterday that the licensed anthrax vaccine is safe and effective for preventing all forms of anthrax, including inhalational anthrax, thereby undermining the rationale of a recent court injunction that halted the Pentagon's anthrax vaccination program.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture is banning the use of "downer" cattle for human food and taking several other new steps to keep beef products contaminated with the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) out of the food supply, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – The Washington state cow announced by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Dec 23 to be a "presumptive positive" bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) case, was born in April 1997, before the August 1997 Food and Drug Administration ban on feeding ruminant-derived meat and bone meal supplements to cattle went into effect.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal officials took pains to assure the public today that the risk of contamination in the US beef supply is very low following yesterday's announcement that the nation's first apparent case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, had turned up in Washington state.

(CIDRAP News) – Stating that US soldiers should not be used as "guinea pigs for experimental drugs," a federal district judge in Washington, DC, yesterday granted a preliminary injunction against the Department of Defense's (DoD's) mandatory anthrax vaccination program.

(CIDRAP News) – Britain's health secretary reported this week what could be the world's first case of a person contracting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from a blood transfusion.

John Reid told the House of Commons that a person who died recently of vCJD had received blood in 1996 from a donor who became ill with vCJD in 1999 and died soon afterward.

(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved a new test that clinical laboratories can use to help identify anthrax in cultures of bacteria from people potentially infected with the pathogen.

Dec 31, 2002 (CIDRAP News) – Individuals receiving smallpox vaccine should wait 3 weeks before donating blood, according to guidance issued yesterday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The recommendations are being issued as a precautionary measure to reduce the "very slight risk" of bloodborne exposure to vaccinia virus in certain patient populations, according to the agency.

(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday reaffirmed its earlier findings that recent hepatitis outbreaks in Tennessee, Georgia, and Pennsylvania were caused by green onions (scallions) from Mexico.

Dec 10, 2004 (CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has put the finishing touches on record-keeping rules designed to help the agency trace the sources and travels of contaminated food, but food businesses have at least a year to comply.