smallpox

See the following -

Anthrax Blunder Reveals Deadly Potential Of Accidents

Christine Gorman | Scientific American | June 23, 2014

A lab director has reportedly been reassigned and other heads at the U.S. Center for Disease Control are likely to roll after an incident earlier this month in which at least 75 staff members may have accidentally been exposed to live samples of anthrax being transported from one lab to another....

Read More »

CDC Official Protests Federal Medical Response Cuts

Diane Barnes | Nextgov.com | April 29, 2014

More than half a decade of reductions to spending on state and local public-health agencies has already been "extremely damaging" to capabilities across the country for responding to unconventional attacks and other disasters, Dr. Ali Khan, director of the Public Health Preparedness and Response Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Global Security Newswire in an interview. 

Read More »

Cities Might Not Be As Prepared As They Think For A Bioterrorism Attack

John Metcalfe | The Atlantic Cities | July 24, 2013

Imagine that a small group of terrorists deliberately infect themselves with smallpox and then walk around London, spreading it to the populace. How much could the terrible disease proliferate before the world realized something was amiss? Read More »

Citing Anthrax And Smallpox Scares, White House Tells Federal Labs To Take Stock

Rebecca Carroll | Nextgov.com | August 28, 2014

After recent mishandling of potentially deadly pathogens, the White House is urging all federal laboratories to conduct what it is calling a “safety stand-down,” security and science officials announced Thursday.  Agencies that handle infectious agents or toxins have been asked to complete overviews of their programs within 30 days of a memo dated Aug. 18...

Read More »

Found: Forgotten Vials Of Smallpox

Maryn McKenna | WIRED | July 8, 2014

Headline-making news today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Workers clearing out an old storage room on the Bethesda, Md. campus of the National Institutes of Health have found a forgotten box of vials that contain smallpox...

Read More »

Is the 2015 Nobel Prize a turning point for traditional Chinese medicine?

So the Nobel Prize is not only acknowledging this complete transformation of a Chinese herb through modern biomedical science into something powerfully efficacious, but also the millions of lives saved because of its successful application worldwide, particularly in the developing world. But there’s something else that marks Tu as extraordinary vis-à-vis both her two fellow Nobel Laureates for medicine, William C Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura, and her more Western medically oriented colleagues in pharmacology. She embodies, in both her history and her research, what I call medical bilingualism – the ability not only to read in two different medical languages but to understand their different histories, conceptual differences, and, most importantly for this unexpected news, potential value for therapeutic interventions in the present.

Read More »

Pandemic and all-hazards preparedness, response law emboldens U.S. disaster recovery efforts

Kim Reilly | Homeland Preparedness News | June 25, 2019

The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing (PAHPA) Innovation Act, S. 1379, became law on Monday with the president's signature, prompting accolades from national stakeholders, company executives and federal lawmakers. The far-reaching law ensures the United States will be better prepared to respond to a wide range of public health emergencies, whether man-made or occurring through a natural disaster or infectious disease. Overall, the law aims to bolster the nation's health security strategy, strengthen the country's emergency response workforce, prioritize a threat-based approach, and increase communication across the advanced research and development of medical countermeasures (MCMs), among numerous provisions contained in the law.

Read More »

The World Knows an Apocalyptic Pandemic Is Coming

[Laurie Garrett | Foreign Policy | September 20, 2019

A new independent report compiled at the request of the United Nations secretary-general warns that there is a "very real threat" of a pandemic sweeping the planet, killing up to 80 million people. A deadly pathogen, spread airborne around the world, the report says, could wipe out almost 5 percent of the global economy. And we're not ready. The ominous analysis was compiled by an independent panel, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), which was assembled last year in response to a request from the office of the U.N. secretary-general, and convened jointly by the World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO). Co-chaired by the former WHO head and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and the head of the international Red Cross, Elhadj As Sy, the GPMB commissioned expert studies and issued a scathing attack on the political, financial, and logistical state of pandemic preparedness affairs.

Read More »

Worse Than Ebola: U.S. Not Preparing for the Next Bio-Threat

Maggie Fox | NBC News | May 1, 2017

The U.S. government is slacking off on preparing for the next big pandemic or biological terrorism attack and is not only endangering its citizens but also missing out on a great opportunity to score political points, experts said Monday. Protecting the United States from the next pandemic of killer flu, or from a bioterrorist strike, is something Republicans and Democrats can easily agree on, a top congressional appropriator told a biodefense panel...

Read More »