News & Perspective

Disclosure: The University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, which publishes CIDRAP News, has produced training programs and materials for the BioWatch program. The news team has no involvement in the center's BioWatch work.

In the wake of a newspaper investigation that questioned the value of the federal BioWatch program for detecting dangerous airborne pathogens, some public health officials familiar with the program acknowledge that it's far from perfect, but they say it's not time to scrap it.

(CIDRAP News) – A report from the National Research Council (NRC) calls for some changes in a US Army immunization program for lab researchers who work with dangerous pathogens, saying the vaccines need to be made more accessible to civilian scientists.

(CIDRAP News) – The National Research Council (NRC), in a letter report, has advised the US Army to prepare a more comprehensive risk assessment than it initially proposed for a biodefense laboratory to be built at Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Md.

(CIDRAP News) – Scientists who helped the FBI investigate the 2001 anthrax letter attacks today released the details of the genomic analysis that linked the anthrax used in the attacks to a flask in the custody of government scientist Bruce Ivins, who the FBI concluded was the perpetrator.

(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.

(CIDRAP News) – After a review of scientific methods that the FBI used in probing the 2001 anthrax mailings, a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) announced today that the available scientific evidence by itself is not adequate to reach a definitive conclusion about the source of the anthrax spores used in the attacks.