News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Exactly 100 of about 38,000 civilians who received smallpox shots in a federal program in 2003 suffered serious adverse events afterward, signaling that the program successfully screened out most people at risk for complications, according to a recent report.

(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.

Editor's note: This story was revised Aug 17 to add information on funding and a link to the government's request for proposals to supply the vaccine.

(CIDRAP News) – The US government has called for proposals to supply up to 80 million doses of a weakened smallpox vaccine to protect people for whom the conventional vaccine is too risky, according to two vaccine manufacturers.

Editor's note: This article was revised Aug 15, 2005, to include additional information regarding earlier related research.

(CIDRAP News) – Genetic mutations in monkeypox viruses of West African origin might have spared the lives of people infected with the virus in the United States, according to a recent report.

Though primarily a disease of rodents and nonhuman primates, monkeypox can occasionally spread to humans and cause a smallpox-like illness. In the summer of 2003, an outbreak of the disease occurred in six Midwestern states.

(CIDRAP News) – The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) is calling the US government's stockpile of antiviral drugs "totally inadequate" in the face of a potential influenza pandemic.

(CIDRAP News) – The influential journal Foreign Affairs is adding its voice to the warnings about a potential influenza pandemic by publishing a special section on pandemics in its forthcoming July/August issue.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization's (WHO's) plan to build an international emergency stockpile of smallpox vaccine drew support from member countries at their recent annual meeting in Geneva.

The World Health Assembly (WHA) "welcomed progress on WHO's work to establish a global smallpox vaccine reserve," the WHO said in a statement during the meeting, which ended last week.