News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The National Biodefense Science Board (NBSB) during its meeting today took on two new tasks: to help guide federal efforts to improve situational awareness for potential public health emergencies and to help work out a strategy for improving and modernizing the management of the government's Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).

(CIDRAP News) – The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday unveiled two new tools designed to boost pandemic preparedness: an inventory of H5N1 avian influenza genetic changes and a system the CDC and its partners are developing to help evaluate the threat from flu viruses circulating in animals.

(CIDRAP News) – A study showing that it takes as few as five mutations to turn the H5N1 avian influenza virus into an airborne spreader in mammals—and that launched a historic debate on scientific accountability and transparency—was released today in Science, spilling the full experimental details that many experts had sought to suppress out of concern that publishing them could lead to the unleashing of a dangerous virus.

(CIDRAP News) – US health officials today announced the establishment of three public-private centers designed to give the nation a new and stronger ability to quickly make vaccines and drugs to respond to bioterrorist attacks, pandemic influenza, and other public health emergencies.

(CIDRAP News) – Clinicians are heeding antiviral prescribing guidance changes made over the past decade because of antiviral resistance and a greater focus on protecting high-risk patients, particularly during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – Hong Kong health officials raised the pandemic influenza response level from alert to serious today after one of the local hospitals confirmed an H5 infection in a boy from China's Guandong province.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Assembly (WHA) wrapped up its annual meeting May 26 in Geneva, with attendees turning their attention to several infectious disease–related topics, including implementation of the International Health Regulations (IHRs) and pandemic flu preparedness.

(CIDRAP News) – The Institute of Medicine (IOM) yesterday shared findings of three public opinion panels on antiviral distribution during a flu pandemic, including a nod for establishing diverse alternative strategies and support for Web and cell-phone information.

(CIDRAP News) – Survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that at the peak of the H1N1 influenza pandemic in the fall of 2009, Americans were more worried about seasonal flu than the pandemic virus, according to a study published in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses.