Recent News

By Category: Countermeasures

Hawaii gets $5.3M for emergency preparedness

(Bizjournals.com) Among the measures covered by the state's public health emergency preparedness planning and training are food safety defense, rapid detection, identification and response to toxins, bioterrorism preparedness and effective public notification and …

New Report Reviews Risk Assessment Plans for Proposed Fort Detrick Facility

(National Academies) A new report from the National Research Council says that an Army contractor’s strategy for conducting a site-specific risk assessment (SSRA) for the proposed Medical Countermeasures Test and Evaluation Facility at Fort Detrick, Md., is not sufficiently robust to help the Army design a facility that will reduce potential hazards. The separation of  Read More »

U.S. Restructures $1.5B Biodefense Research Effort

The U.S. Defense Department is significantly restructuring a 5-year-old, $1.5 billion program amid charges it is failing in its mission to develop countermeasures employable against large classes of potential biological warfare agents, Nature reported last week (see GSN, Jan. 18). The Defense Threat Reduction Agency is incorporating elements of the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative into  Read More »

Strategic National Stockpile Still Lacking Key Medical Treatments

The decade since the 2001 anthrax attacks has seen notable successes in efforts to build up the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile of medical countermeasures, but significant gaps remain in fielding treatments for a WMD incident, the Associated Press reported on Monday (see GSN, Feb. 8). (Sep. 27) – A corridor of the U.S. Strategic National  Read More »

PharmAthene Awarded 50% Profit Split on Worldwide Sales of Smallpox Antiviral

(PR Newswire) PharmAthene filed the lawsuit against SIGA in December 2006 citing PharmAthene's interest in ST-246, an orally available smallpox antiviral drug candidate. "We are extremely pleased with the Court's decision," remarked Eric I. Richman, President and …