News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – If public health emergency preparedness were a college class, the federal government would be considered a poor pupil by the nonprofit organization Trust For America's Health (TFAH), which gives the government a D+ in a new report released yesterday.

That grade was based on a survey of 20 leading public health experts, who used 12 criteria to measure preparedness.

(CIDRAP News) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently reconstructed the 1918 pandemic influenza virus for research purposes, has classified the virus as a "select agent," imposing special rules on groups that handle it.

(CIDRAP News) – Hospital residents did poorly on a test of their ability to recognize and manage diseases potentially related to bioterrorism, but they fared much better after taking an online training program, according to a report in Archives of Internal Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – Amid the devastation left by hurricane Katrina on the US Gulf Coast, fears of infectious disease outbreaks have added to the distress. Some of those concerns are solidly grounded, while others are less so, disease experts say.

(CIDRAP News) – Two research reports on plague were recently released, one describing the mechanism that the plague bacterium uses to evade the body's immune system and the other describing a potential vaccine that was tested successfully in mice.

(CIDRAP News) – The plot of the world's latest pneumonic plague outbreak echoes with history.

Like a 19th-century American gold rush, news of the discovery of diamonds in a remote northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in November 2004 sparked an influx of adventurers hoping to strike it rich.

Editor's note: This story was revised shortly after publication to reflect corrections issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on May 10. The corrections pertain to the total monetary amount of the grants and to the project descriptions for XOMA (US) LLC and DVC Dynport LLC.

(CIDRAP News) – A bleak picture of the world's ability to cope with an influenza pandemic is painted in an essay by infectious-disease and bioterrorism expert Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced plans to collaborate with the defense departments of Canada and the United Kingdom to develop a vaccine for plague, which would fill an empty slot in the nation's current vaccine arsenal.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said today it has found 130 suspected cases of plague, 57 of them fatal, in its ongoing investigation of an outbreak in the northeastern Congo.

In its previous update on Mar 9, the agency had reported 114 cases, including 54 deaths.