News & Perspective

Jul 13, 2013 (CIDRAP News) – A National Research Council (NRC) review on the nation's options for a high-containment lab for studying the world's most contagious animal diseases found that a currently proposed facility set for construction in Manhattan, Kan., or a scaled-back version of it, could meet long-term needs.

(CIDRAP News) – A review and mapping study to gauge the burden of zoonotic diseases found that Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and India are four top hot spots and that a surging demand for livestock products will likely fuel the spread of several diseases.

(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) – A federal assessment of the proposed National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), a biosafety-level (BSL) 4 lab to be built on the Kansas State University (KSU) campus in Manhattan, Kan., is incomplete and should be expanded and updated, the National Research Council (NRC) said in a report today.

(CIDRAP News) – The safeguards designed to keep diseased animals from being imported into the United States have sizable holes, and the federal agencies that oversee those safeguards need to coordinate better to improve them, says a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

(CIDRAP News) – Two California children who had not had contact with pigs recently recovered from infections with "unique" swine influenza viruses, raising concern about possible human-to-human transmission and putting health authorities on alert, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) approval yesterday of two more avian influenza (AI) tests for use in a voluntary national poultry health program will improve the protection of US flocks from avian flu, according to USDA officials and animal health experts.

(CIDRAP News) – A new influenza virus discovered in Missouri pigs has a combination of genes from avian and swine flu viruses, supporting the theory that pigs can serve as a mixing vessel for flu viruses and a potential source for a human pandemic strain, according to a report published yesterday.