News & Perspective

(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) – In a move that sets the stage for the official eradication of the deadly cattle plague rinderpest, animal health authorities are ending all field activities to control the disease, theUnited Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced today.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials today released guidance on how companies that supply synthetic DNA should screen orders to guard against attempts by groups or individuals to use the materials to create dangerous organisms.

(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) – The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today said Kansas State University (KSU) is its preferred site among six candidates for a facility to replace the federal Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York.

(CIDRAP News) – A leak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) virus at any of six proposed sites for a large federal laboratory to study foreign animal diseases could cost billions of dollars, according to a recent report by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).