News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Though much of the nation's ability to detect potentially catastrophic disease outbreaks, manmade or otherwise, is in the hands of state and local agencies, the federal government still lacks a comprehensive view of the role it plays in biosurveillance, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported.

(CIDRAP News) – Although no successful attacks on the US agriculture and food system have been reported in the past decade, the nation's efforts to defend the system came in for a barrage of criticism yesterday about a lack of coordination and various other shortcomings.

(CIDRAP News) – Public health leaders, recalling and reflecting on the anthrax letter attacks of 2001 in a lengthy report released today, say the nation is better prepared to respond to such an emergency than it was 10 years ago, but their confidence is tinged with fear of slipping backward in the current era of budget cutting.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently reported progress on implementing the new FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), including several measures that took effect Jul 3, such as the authority to suspend food facility registration when it believes foods could pose a risk.

(CIDRAP News) – The National Research Council's (NRC's) report on the FBI's anthrax investigation amounts to a general endorsement of the agency's scientific approach, even though the NRC found that the purely scientific evidence on the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks was not conclusive, a leading anthrax expert said today.