Recent News

By Category: Agents & Toxins

Inhalation anthrax treatment, raxibacumab, gets FDA approval

(TheGlobalDispatch) The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved GlaxoSmithKline’s raxibacumab injection to treat inhalation anthrax, a lethal form of the infectious disease caused by breathing in the spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, according to an FDA press release Friday. The approval comes just a month after the Anti-Infective Drugs Advisory Committee for FDA Read More »

June 24, 2013
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Countermeasures, and Research
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Tests being developed to aid ricin, toxin investigations

(SpokesmanReview) As federal prosecutors build a case against a Spokane man charged with sending ricin-laced letters to the president, the CIA, a federal judge and Fairchild Air Force Base, one of the legal challenges they’ll face is proving that the substance is indeed ricin, a lethal poison derived from ground seeds of the castor plant. Read More »

June 21, 2013
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism
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Hearing set for ricin-laced letters suspect

(DenverPost) Federal authorities don’t want bond set for a Texas woman accused of mailing ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama threatening violence against gun-control advocates. Shannon Richardson’s detention hearing is set for Thursday in Texarkana. She’s been in custody since her June 7 arrest. Authorities say the 35-year-old pregnant actress sent the letters to Obama Read More »

June 20, 2013
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Biological Weapons, and Bioterrorism
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BioWatch’s chief aim is off-target, U.S. security officials say

(LATimes) Homeland Security Department planners have privately rejected a central premise of BioWatch, the nation’s decade-old system for detecting biological weapons released into the air, according to government documents and testimony Tuesday at a congressional hearing. Although BioWatch was designed with the belief that hostile foreign governments could sponsor large-scale germ attacks on American cities, Read More »

June 19, 2013
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Bioterrorism, and Policy & Initiatives
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Yellow Fever Outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo

(GlobalBiodefense) An emergency mass vaccination campaign against yellow fever is being launched next week in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following laboratory confirmation of six cases in the country to date. The campaign aims to cover at least 503,426 people in three affected health zones. The six laboratory-confirmed cases included four patients in Lubao Read More »