News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – In the history of infectious diseases, coincidence plays an extraordinary role. In 1706, Cotton Mather purchased a slave named Onesimus who happened to come from a tribe that practiced variolation, and so smallpox prevention was introduced to North America.

– TORONTO (CIDRAP News) – Ten years after H5N1 avian influenza first began to raise fears of a potential pandemic, the world has a stronger set of tools to contain that virus and similar threats, but also a fresh awareness of humanity's vulnerability to fast-spreading diseases, experts said yesterday at an international conference on flu.

(CIDRAP News) – In a major effort to track influenza viruses in nature and learn more about how they interact with the human body, the federal government this week announced a $23-million-a-year program to fund research centers at six institutions around the country.

(CIDRAP News) – Orlando, FL – Julie Gerberding, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), today challenged health and business leaders to stay focused on the "marathon" of preparing for an influenza pandemic.

Gerberding, speaking at a conference on business preparedness, said it's not possible to maintain high public interest in the pandemic threat indefinitely, but leaders must keep preparing anyway.

(CIDRAP News) – Speakers at a national conference in Minneapolis today sought to impress business leaders with the potentially disastrous effects of an influenza pandemic without scaring them into thinking that preparing for one is futile.

(CIDRAP News) – The strain of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) that erupted from obscurity to kill 774 people worldwide has gone quiet, at least for now. Yet its lessons will keep benefiting people even if it never reappears.