(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.
(CIDRAP News) – The plot of the world's latest pneumonic plague outbreak echoes with history.
Like a 19th-century American gold rush, news of the discovery of diamonds in a remote northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in November 2004 sparked an influx of adventurers hoping to strike it rich.
(CIDRAP News) – Member countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday approved the first major revision of the WHO's rules to prevent the international spread of diseases in decades.
(CIDRAP News) The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced that $1.33 billion will be available in this year's round of funding to states to improve preparedness for terrorism and other public health emergencies.
(CIDRAP News) – State health departments have improved their terrorism preparedness capabilities since 2001, but some of the improvement might have come at the expense of other public health programs, says a report released today.
Editor's note: This story was revised shortly after publication to reflect corrections issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on May 10. The corrections pertain to the total monetary amount of the grants and to the project descriptions for XOMA (US) LLC and DVC Dynport LLC.
(CIDRAP News) A bleak picture of the world's ability to cope with an influenza pandemic is painted in an essay by infectious-disease and bioterrorism expert Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.
(CIDRAP News ) With a federal judge's permission, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced it will resume giving anthrax shots to military personnel, but on a strictly voluntary basis.
(CIDRAP News) Giving people an anthrax shot and antibiotic treatment in the wake of an attack is probably the most cost-effective response to the threat of an anthrax assault on an American city, according to a new study.
(CIDRAP News) – Poor policy communication and a lack of clearly defined goals seriously hindered the smallpox preparedness program that the federal government launched in 2003, according to a report released by the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM) last week.
