(CIDRAP News) Systems for rapidly detecting contaminants in drinking water should be a high priority for federal funding to make the nation's water systems more secure, according to a group of experts consulted by Congress's General Accounting Office (GAO).
(CIDRAP News) With a Dec 12 deadline approaching, fewer than 20% of food establishments that must register with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under new regulations for protecting the US food supply have done so, FDA officials said yesterday.
(CIDRAP News) The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced the start of the first human trial of a vaccine for Ebola virus infection, a currently untreatable disease that kills most of its victims.
(CIDRAP News) Scientists funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) created a functioning copy of a virus in the record-breaking time of 2 weeks, DOE officials announced yesterday.
The virus is a phagea type that infects bacteriaand is harmless to humans, officials said. It was created as part of a research program to develop microbes that can help solve energy and environmental problems.
(CIDRAP News) – The federal government has moved to allow individuals and groups to continue working with certain hazardous biological agents beyond the Nov 12 deadline for complying with new registration rules while the government completes background checks on those groups.
(CIDRAP News) – State health departments have more than doubled their corps of epidemiologists working on infectious diseases and terrorism preparedness in the past 2 years, but the number is still too low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
(CIDRAP News) To bring coherence to a poorly coordinated national effort, the United States should focus its current bioterrorism preparedness program on four specific threat scenarios involving anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin, and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), according to a report by defense consultant and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig.
(CIDRAP News) – The Food and Drug Administration today announced the release of a report to Congress on its progress toward developing faster tests to detect food contamination.
(CIDRAP News) – The National Research Council (NRC) this week proposed a plan to expand and formalize the system for screening research proposals in order to keep biotechnology from playing into the hands of terrorists.
(CIDRAP News) Federal health officials yesterday announced grants to build 11 new biodefense laboratories around the country, including two that will be authorized to study the most dangerous pathogens.
