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 outbreak of avian influenza in South Korea has spread to at least 14 farms and triggered the culling of 1.2 million chickens and ducks since it was identified in mid-December, according to reports from Asian newspapers.

(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) – The Ministry of Health of China on Friday, Dec 26, told the World Health Organization (WHO) of a suspected case of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), according to a WHO update. The patient, a 32-year-old freelance television worker from the Panyu District of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, experienced fever and headache Dec 16 and sought medical help on the 20th.

(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) – No more SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) cases have cropped up in the wake of the single case reported in Taiwan last week, and quarantine or self-monitoring orders for most of the patient's contacts have been lifted.

(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.