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By Category: Policy & Initiatives

South Africa’s ‘Dr. Death’ faces ethics inquiry

(LA Times) Wouter Basson ran the apartheid-era regime’s germ and chemical warfare program, Project Coast. He is charged with manufacturing dangerous drugs, some of which allegedly were used on activists.

September 29, 2011
| Filed under Africa, Biological Weapons, and Policy & Initiatives
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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 …

September 28, 2011
| Filed under North America, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, Public Health, and Research
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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 »

September 28, 2011
| Filed under North America, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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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 »

September 28, 2011
| Filed under North America, Bioterrorism, Countermeasures, Policy & Initiatives, and Public Health
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VIDEO Preview, “The Anthrax Files”

FRONTLINE takes a hard look at the FBI's investigation of the country's most notorious act of bioterrorism. In the fall of 2001 envelopes carrying deadly …