Jul 13, 2013 (CIDRAP News) – A National Research Council (NRC) review on the nation's options for a high-containment lab for studying the world's most contagious animal diseases found that a currently proposed facility set for construction in Manhattan, Kan., or a scaled-back version of it, could meet long-term needs.
(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found violations of its egg safety rules on about 40% of the farms it inspected in 2011, but only about 3% of the problems were serious enough to call for FDA action, according to an agency report released yesterday.
Jul 10, 2012
(CIDRAP News) – A review and mapping study to gauge the burden of zoonotic diseases found that Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and India are four top hot spots and that a surging demand for livestock products will likely fuel the spread of several diseases.
(CIDRAP News) – News reports about possible airflow problems at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab in Atlanta are fueling perceptions that the agency isn't following its own rules, but the reported conditions at the lab don't appear to have posed a public health threat, according to some expert observers.
(CIDRAP News) – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) have announced a global campaign to control foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), a highly contagious livestock disease that does not threaten humans but can be economically devastating.
Jun 26, 2012
(CIDRAP News) – Mexican veterinary authorities are intensifying avian influenza control efforts in a region that houses several large commercial farms after further tests determined that the strain responsible for more than 200,000 bird deaths at three farms is the highly pathogenic H7N3 subtype.
The events represent the first highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in Mexican flocks since the country battled H5N2 in the mid 1990s.
(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.
Jun 15, 2012