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By Category: Policy & Initiatives

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 »

U.S. Bioterror Detection Program Comes Under Scrutiny

(ScientificAmerican) A cutting-edge biological terror alert system detected a potential threat in the air one morning back in 2008, threatening to derail then-Sen. Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver for his party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Initial results from a pricey national air sampling system suggested that bacteria that could cause tularemia  Read More »

BioWatch faces congressional hearing this week

(LATimes) WASHINGTON — A decade ago, then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge oversaw the start of BioWatch, the nationwide system designed to detect airborne releases of anthrax or other biological weapons. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush had announced that BioWatch would “protect our people and our homeland.”Ridge’s expectations were  Read More »

Update to Interim Guidance for Preexposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) for the Prevention of HIV Infection: PrEP for Injecting Drug Users

(CDC) On June 12, 2013, the Thailand Ministry of Health and CDC published results from a randomized controlled trial of a daily oral dose of 300 mg of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) that showed efficacy in reducing the acquisition of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection among injecting drug users (IDUs) (1). Based on these findings,  Read More »

Supreme Court Decision Opens the Doors to A Boom in Synthetic Biology

(CoExist) Today’s Supreme Court ruling on the patenting of human genes was a boost to the field of synthetic biology. While human genes cannot be directly patented, the Court found, so-called complementary DNA can. This is DNA that is synthesized from the rNA in a genetic template and then cloned. The Court found that while  Read More »

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