• U.S. faces growing biological threat

    An international treaty banned biological warfare in 1975, but it had no inspection and verification plan; hundreds of tons of anthrax bacteria and other pathogens were produced by the Soviet Union in violation of the treaty and only ordered destroyed in 1988 as the cold war ended; when U.S. scientists visited the anthrax burial sites, they found live spores had survived

  • Cholera outbreak closing in on Haiti capital; hundreds dead

    Nearly 300 Haitians have already succumbed to cholera, and 3,000 were sickened; health organizations fear that the squalid camps in Port-au-Prince where 1.3 million earthquake survivors live offer the disease an enormous potential breeding ground; with the corrupt, indifferent, and ineffective Haitian government not doing much more than paying lip service to the severity of the situation, the task of containing the disease from turning into another national tragedy falls to international bodies, NGOs, and local volunteers

  • SIGA wins $500 million contract to produce smallpox antiviral

    SIGA has received a $500 contract — the contract will be worth as much as $2.8 billion if the government exercises all of its options — to produce the first specialized treatment for smallpox bioterror attacks and related infections; before the company can begin work, it must fend off a legal challenge from Chimerix, Inc., an unsuccessful bidder for the contract; Chimerix claims SIGA misrepresented itself as a small business in order to win this small-business set-aside

  • Synthetic DNA makers alerted to bioterrorism threats

    Scientists have been engineering genetic sequences for decades and commercial gene sequencing has been around for years — but this year, researchers for the first time were able to design and produce cells that do not exist in nature without using pre-existing biological matter — marking the latest evolution in the rapidly advancing field of synthetic biology; the developments could pave the way for advancements in medicine, energy, and agriculture, but also could put sensitive materials in the wrong hands; it will soon be possible to recreate bacterial pathogens like smallpox — and even enhance these pathogens, making them more potent

  • Spray-on skin to be commercialized

    Sheffield, U.K.-based Altrika set to produce a spray version of its Cryoskin donor skin cell product that can be applied in hospitals outside of a sterile surgical environment in order to reduce treatment time; the spray would be stored in individual doses so the right number of skin cells can be selected once the wound is assessed; the cells would then be thawed as the patient is being prepared

  • Novel approach detects unknown food pathogens

    Technologies for rapid detection of bacterial pathogens are crucial to maintaining a secure food supply; researchers have designed and implemented a sophisticated statistical approach that allows computers to improve their ability to detect the presence of bacterial contamination in tested samples; these formulas propel machine-learning, enabling the identification of known and unknown classes of food pathogens

  • A superbug could spread to every single person on Earth in one year

    If certain conditions obtain, a particularly contagious virus would spread across the planet and infect every single person on Earth in one year; the conditions: it must be a strain of influenza, originate in a major city, and arise during the winter

  • Phone call patterns reveal emerging disease outbreaks

    People who come down with a fever or full-blown flu tend to move around less and make fewer calls late at night and early in the morning; a trial shows that monitoring the calling patterns of individuals in a trial group correctly identified flu victims in the group 90 percent of the time; epidemiologists say this method may be applied nation-wide to convey telltale signatures of illness to doctors and agencies monitoring new outbreaks

  • BioWatch system faces technical, operational challenges

    In 2003 U.S. authorities set up a network of air samplers in major cities designed quickly to detect biological agents released in a terrorist attacks; new report says that the system, known as BioWatch, faces “serious technical and operational challenges”

  • DoD awards contract for pathogen detection

    IntegenX wins a $15 million contract to develop a pathogen detection and identification platform; the company will use a technology developed under a previous DoD contract to purify DNA from pathogen targets contained in complex matrices and present the purified material to an IntegenX library construction module

  • Anti-dengue mosquitoes to be released in Australia and Vietnam

    Some 100 million people in the tropics get dengue fever each year, and 40,000 are killed by it; the virus’s range is expanding, and last week France reported its first locally acquired cases; Australian scientists will release mosquitoes called Wolbachia that infect the disease-carrying Aedes mosquitoes, and makes them less able to carry the dengue virus; the release will take place in Australia and Vietnam

  • Sea floor organisms offer response to bioterrorism

    Two companies, with $30 million funding from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, will search for new antibiotics at the bottom of the ocean that could be used to fight bioterrorism; the companies expect to find treatments for the bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, and other bacterial infections that could be utilized by terror groups for an attack on the United States

  • A new dual vaccine protects against both smallpox and anthrax

    A new protective vaccine against both smallpox and anthrax, two agents of bioterrorism, shows promise in animal models; the new vaccine more quickly elicited immunity and was more effective than the licensed anthrax vaccine, BioThrax, in protecting mice and rabbits against anthrax

  • Georgia county tests drive-thru shot clinic

    Decatur County, Georgia, Health Department’s drive-thru flu shot clinic was held last Friday, and more than 250 people received their vaccination; the important thing, said Sherry Hutchins, Decatur of the County Health Department, is that “The clinic—- gives the health department a chance to test our ability to swiftly, efficiently dispense medicines during a mass-exposure event like a bioterrorism attack, a disaster or an influenza pandemic”

  • The world is running out of helium

    It has taken 4.7 billion years for the Earth to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will have exhausted within about a hundred years of the U.S.’s National Helium Reserve having been established in 1925; there is no chemical way of manufacturing helium, and the supplies we have originated in the very slow radioactive alpha decay that occurs in rocks