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By Category: Agents & Toxins

Darpa, Venter Launch Assembly Line for Genetic Engineering

(Danger Room) The military-industrial complex just got a little bit livelier. Quite literally. That’s because Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, has kicked off a program designed to take the conventions of manufacturing and apply them to living cells. Think of it like an assembly line, but one that would churn out modified biological matter Read More »

May 24, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Biotechnology, and Research
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Indifferent reporting of notifiable diseases

(Canadian Medical Association Journal) As a signatory to the International Health Regulations, Canada has an obligation to report cases if yellow fever, plague, cholera and all other diseases that might be considered to potentially cause a “public health emergency of international concern.” It is a truism that Canadian physicians and other health workers are legally Read More »

May 23, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, International, and Public Health
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Pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccination produces antibodies against multiple flu strains

(Emory University) The pandemic 2009 H1N1 vaccine can generate antibodies in vaccinated individuals not only against the H1N1 virus, but also against other influenza virus strains including H5N1 and H3N2. This discovery adds an important new dimension to the finding last year that people infected with pandemic 2009 H1N1 virus produced high levels of antibodies Read More »

May 23, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Countermeasures, and Public Health
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Carl Zimmer: Curing our Influenza Amnesia

(World Science Festival) Our brains are not the only places where we can store memories. Each time a new pathogen invades our bodies, our immune cells have an opportunity to recognize it by some feature, usually some distinctive cleft or spike of a protein on its surface. After our bodies defeat the infection, some immune Read More »

May 22, 2012
| Filed under North America, Agents & Toxins, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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Zooming in on bacterial weapons in 3-D

(Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) Max Planck scientists decipher the structure of bacterial injection needles at atomic resolution. The plague, bacterial dysentery, and cholera have one thing in common: These dangerous diseases are caused by bacteria which infect their host using a sophisticated injection apparatus. Through needle-like structures, they release molecular agents into their host cell, thereby evading the Read More »