News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – A group of scientists acting under the aegis of a vaccine research advocacy organization has asked President Obama's bioethics committee to evaluate the ethics of experiments designed to increase the transmissibility of H5N1 avian influenza viruses.

(CIDRAP News) – The United States still lacks a way to assess the need for high-containment laboratories and national standards for building and maintaining them, despite 2009 recommendations, according to a report yesterday from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

(CIDRAP News) – The Obama Administration this week unveiled the nation's first national biosurveillance strategy, designed to detect a range of threats, including bioterror attacks, infectious disease outbreaks, agricultural threats, and foodborne illness outbreaks.

(CIDRAP News) – The goal of an integrated national biosurveillance system to detect threats to human and animal health, called for in a presidential directive in 2004, is still a long way from reality and faces complex obstacles, according to a workshop summary recently published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

(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).

Maryn McKennaContributing Writer

(CIDRAP News) – This in-depth article investigates the prospects for development of vaccines to head off the threat of an influenza pandemic posed by the H5N1 avian influenza virus. Its seven parts put advances in vaccine technology in perspective by illuminating the formidable barriers to producing an effective and widely usable vaccine in a short time frame.