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By Category: Research

Pool chemical could be effective at cleaning anthrax-tainted water supplies

New research has revealed that a common pool chemical could effectively be used as a decontaminant for water supplies that are tainted with anthrax. Ellen Raber, the director of the Environmental Protection Department at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and her daughter, Alison Burklund, a student at the Athenian School in Danville, California, published Read More »

October 4, 2010
| Filed under Research
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Twofer for the Biggest Bioterror Threats?

If you ask biodefense experts to name two diseases that keep them awake at night, there’s a good chance they’ll mention smallpox and anthrax. Both are highly lethal, and current vaccines have major problems. Now, researchers have found a way to target both threats at the same time: a candidate vaccine that protects against the Read More »

October 4, 2010
| Filed under North America, Biotechnology, Countermeasures, and Research
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Who is in Charge of Biodefense?

Photo credit: stock.xchng Who is in charge of carrying out our nation’s biodefense policy? This question was raised repeatedly in Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate Labor-Health and Human Services subcommittee. The hearing focused on bioterrorism, biosecurity, and medical countermeasures in contrast to last week’s senate hearing on terrorism during which the topic was barely mentioned. Read More »

September 30, 2010
| Filed under Research
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Livermore Lab to Work on WMD Plume Tracking

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is set to collaborate with the owner of roughly 8,000 U.S. weather tracking posts on a system to assess the movement of potentially lethal materials following a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear strike, the San Francisco Business Times reported yesterday (see GSN, June 30, 2008). Maryland-based AWS Convergence Read More »

September 30, 2010
| Filed under North America, Biological Weapons, and Research
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DARPA creates program to investigate how viruses evolve

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has recently created a new grant program called Prophecy that is geared towards investigations into how viruses might evolve in order to improve efforts by biopharmaceuticals to head off health threats. In addition to public health threats, projects developed through Prophecy could undoubtedly help protect against biological threats from Read More »