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By Category: Policy & Initiatives

How the World Health Organization is Helping to Prevent a Catastrophic H5N1 …

(World Health Organization HQ, Geneva) H5N1 influenza is what keeps people here up at night. The flu strain is deadly to humans on an order of magnitude greater than any other flu virus in history, including the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. It kills approximately 60% of the people it infects. Just to put that Read More »

May 8, 2012
| Filed under Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North America, South America, South Asia, International, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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Twin Cities medicine-by-mail test called successful

(CIDRAP News) Without any major hitches, mail carriers delivered empty pill bottles and fliers to about 37,000 Twin Cities area homes yesterday to rehearse part of the planned response to an anthrax attack or widespread disease outbreak, according to officials involved in the exercise. Mail trucks hit the streets at 6 o’clock in the morning, Read More »

May 8, 2012
| Filed under North America, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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Emergency medical delivery test went well, officials say

(Minneapolis Star Tribune) Sunday’s test of an emergency system for delivering medication to Twin Cities households via the U.S. mail went off without obvious hitches, but it’ll take time to assess it for less obvious problems and barriers, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health said Sunday evening. Operation Medicine Delivery was the first Read More »

May 7, 2012
| Filed under North America, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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NIH rejects charge it slanted the H5N1 agenda for NSABB

(CIDRAP News) In a lengthy letter, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) official has rejected recent charges that the agency planned a biased meeting agenda in an effort to induce the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to act as it did in voting for full publication of two much-debated studies on H5N1 virus Read More »

May 7, 2012
| Filed under Europe, North America, International, Policy & Initiatives, and Research
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NIH responds to criticism over handling of flu papers

(Nature.com) The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) today released a response to a sharply worded internal criticism about the handling of two controversial H5N1 avian influenza papers, one of which was published in Nature yesterday. The criticism came from Michael Osterholm, a public-health researcher and member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity Read More »