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(CIDRAP News) – The release of $43.4 million in federal funds to help states detect and respond to animal and plant disease emergencies was announced yesterday by Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman.

The money is a share of $328 million in homeland security funds that Congress and President Bush approved earlier this year for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), USDA officials said in a news release.

(CIDRAP News) – The United States' food supply makes an attractive target for terrorists, and people in the food industry need to talk more frankly about the risks, bioterrorism expert Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, said in a Minneapolis speech yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – A mathematical model developed by two researchers suggests that six letters used in last fall's anthrax attacks spread anthrax spores to more than 5,000 other pieces of mail and led to the deaths of two women who had no known exposure to the pathogen.

(CIDRAP News) – The US House and Senate this week approved legislation providing for a wide range of bioterrorism preparedness measures, from funds for hospital preparedness to tracking of dangerous pathogens and increased inspections of imported food.

(CIDRAP News) – Data on recent salmonellosis outbreaks indicate that drug-resistant strains of Salmonella enterica serotype Newport are becoming increasingly common in dairy cattle and are causing a growing share of infections in humans, according to a foodborne disease expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

(CIDRAP News) – Although clear evidence links a recent widespread outbreak of Salmonella infection in the United States and Canada with eating cantaloupe, just how the cantaloupe became contaminated remains unclear, according to federal and state health officials.

(CIDRAP News) – The federal government is pouring billions of dollars into public health, but the effort to improve the nation's preparedness for bioterrorism faces a severe shortage of people trained in public health disciplines, according to Donald A. Henderson, MD, a top federal adviser on public health preparedness.

(CIDRAP News) – Some people find frogs disgusting, but now a study of an illness outbreak in Mississippi suggests that frogs may be literally nauseating. The case-control study implicates contact with amphibians as a potential risk factor for infection with Salmonella enterica serotype Javiana.

The most common cause of foodborne Salmonella infections grew increasingly resistant to the quinolone nalidixic acid between 1995 and 2000, according to a study from Denmark.

Federal health authorities provide opportunities in the next month for input as they revise the current policy regarding vaccination of the general population.

(CIDRAP News) – A committee of experts convened by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) says that antibiotics should not be used in agriculture except to treat sick animals and protect healthy animals threatened by disease in the herd or flock.

(CIDRAP News) – Foodborne disease outbreaks in public schools increased about 10% per year and made 16,000 students sick in the 1990s, according to the US General Accounting Office (GAO). The agency recommends the creation of a single federal food safety agency with increased authority as one of several steps to improve food safety in the schools.

In a Danish study, patients who had infections with a common drug-resistant type of Salmonella enterica were more than twice as likely to die within 2 years as patients infected with drug-susceptible variants of the same strain.

(CIDRAP News) – A lengthy report by an expert panel on anthrax generally echoes treatment and prevention recommendations made by federal health officials last fall while highlighting how little is known about the epidemiology of the disease, especially how many spores it takes to cause infection.