• Senator Cochran’s earmark savvy benefits Mississippi biodefense center

    Republican Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi is famous for his support of federal earmarks and regularly ranks near the top among senators for the number and size of his annual earmark haul; on Sunday the Senate passed a $1.1 trillion omnibus federal spending bill for the 2010 fiscal year, and Cochran managed to insert $150 million worth of earmarks for Mississippi; among the beneficiaries is Jackson State University’s National Center for Biodefense Communications, which conducts research and compiles data on bioterrorism threats to agriculture, and which is slated to receive $750,000 through the bill

  • Expert: U.S. stance on bioweapons important, does not require inspectors

    The Obama administration has been criticized for, on the one hand, expressing more support than its predecessor for the goals of the Biological Weapons Convention but, on the other hand, for continuing the Bush administration’s objection to a tight inspection regime; an expert says inspections are appropriate for nuclear weapons, but largely irrelevant to biological weapons

  • Sathguru’s center launches first global food safety management program

    Indian research center to hold a program of lectures and seminars for executives dealing with different aspects of food safety; directors of the program say that emerging trends in food production, processing, and distribution require augmented food safety protocols and strategies to ensure safe food supply, especially in emerging economies and world.

  • FDA bars Virginia seafood dealer from importing food for 20 years

    In the FDA’s first debarment of food importer, the agency imposed a 20-year penalty on a Virginia businessman who participated in a conspiracy to sell frozen catfish fillets falsely labeled as sole, grouper, flounder, snakehead, channa, and other species of fish to avoid paying federal import tariff

  • Nicholls to get money for seafood research institute

    Nicholls State University in Louisiana will receive funds to launch the Institute for Seafood Studies, which would aid studies of seafood species, coastal restoration and protection, as well as development of local fisheries and industries connected to them; one of the problems the research institute will address is food safety, which one expert said is a top fear among consumers; “This will enable the seafood community, working with the seafood institute, to help allay those concerns,” the expert said

  • New center monitors safety of U.S. food imports

    A new center will target shipments of imported cargo, including food, for possible safety violations; The center is one of six commercial targeting centers in the United States under Customs and Border Protection.

  • Combating bioterrorism needs to be a collaborative effort

    ISBI founder: “If you want to damage the United States, from a terrorist perspective, there are ways to do this extremely effectively that do not entail an attack on the U.S. homeland. There are ways that our economy could be catastrophically devastated and our political system substantially set back in terms of our global leadership that have nothing to do with a centralized domestic attack. Our vulnerabilities do not stop at the border’s edge.”

  • OSU president Burns Hargis defends anthrax research cancellation decision

    Hargis had ended an anthrax vaccine research project at OSU because it would have resulted in euthanizing baboons; he says he did not bow to pressures from animal rights activists – or from the wife of billionaire T. Boone Pickens, both OSU alumni and major donors to the school.

  • Military researcher infected with tularemia at research laboratory

    Researchers at U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has contracted tularemia; tularemia, which is not transmitted by person to person contact, is considered a potential agent of bioterrorism and biowarfare.

  • HIV-as-terrorism case draws national attention

    Two Michigan neighbors got into a fight, and one of them bit the other; when prosecutors learned from a TV report that the man who bit his neighbor was HIV positive, they added the charge of bioterrorism to the charges of assault and assault with intent to maim; prosecutors say the new charge is based on a 2004 Michigan law, passed in the wake of 9/11, which speaks of “possession or use of a harmful device,” and they point to a Michigan Court of Appeal’s ruling that HIV-infected blood was a “harmful biological substance” under Michigan law.

  • Bio espionage: New threat to U.S. economy

    In January, DHS warned of an increased cyber attack threat by activists/hacktivists and extremist groups; these groups are known to target life sciences and biotech companies; life sciences sector, pharmaceutical sector, and biotech sector are areas where we should expect information security challenges to increase exponentially for the foreseeable future

  • U.S. DNA suppliers warned against bioterrorism threat

    Analysts have expressed concern that DNA sequences can be abused to terrorize and harm entire populations without so much as a bang; the Department of Health and Human Services issued guidelines for the trade in customized DNA sequencing that, if abused, can lead to bioterrorism, with unforeseeable consequences.

  • New guidelines for genetic screening to prevent bioterrorism split scientists

    As the production of very accurate and valid scientific results from genetic screening has become more common among synthetic-biology companies, a fear that this ability will allow bioterrorists to exploit the system has arisen; there is a disagreement over the best method of genetic screening.

  • Bioattack threat to U.S. ignored

    The risk of a bioterror attack on the United States is huge; a one-to-two kilogram release of anthrax spores from a crop duster plane could kill more Americans than died in the Second World War (over 400,000), and the clean-up and other economic costs of such an attack could exceed $1.8 trillion; a former White House official says that U.S. media outlets do not cover this story, and it does not appear that the U.S. government is treating it the problem with the proper urgency

  • Making food safer offers business opportunities

    Recalls, import alerts, and new regulations are all combining to put an increased emphasis on analytical food testing; instrument makers are seeing double-digit growth in the food safety market, even in a poor economy. In the lab, food scientists are working to develop faster, more sensitive methods that can broadly screen for both known and unknown contaminants.