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Evidence the US continued bioterror research until 2003
Thus in contravention to 1925, 1969 and 1997 declarations the US would not do this any more.
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CDC failed to disclose lab incidents with bioterror pathogens to Congress
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday they have identified 34 incident reports involving bioterror pathogens mishandled at CDC labs that were “inadvertently” not disclosed in 2014 to congressional investigators who had asked for the information.
All involved certain heavily regulated agricultural viruses — such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus — classified by the federal government as “select agents” because of their potential to be used as bioweapons and cause significant economic harm.
“It was an inadvertent omission,” Monroe said. He said all of the reports have now been given to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which had asked for the information two years ago in the wake of a CDC lab mishap in Atlanta that potentially exposed dozens of workers to live anthrax.
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FBI Director Comey’s full remarks on Clinton email probe
Nothing about Ebola.
By Mark Berman
July 5, 2016
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RESEARCHERS SEQUENCE GENOME FROM 1979 RUSSIAN ANTHRAX OUTBREAK
Washington, DC – September 27, 2016
In the current study, investigators determined that the strain of B. anthracis that caused this outbreak is most closely related to the Russian Tsiankovskii vaccine strain of the organism. Despite concern that the Soviets were manipulating the organism to become drug-resistant, the strain identified here was simply a natural strain most likely isolated for its biological properties, Keim said; there was no evidence that it had been manipulated in the lab or mixed with other strains. The genome has been made public through the National Center for Biotechnology Information Genome Database.
“This work provides insights into the world’s largest biological weapons program and provides an extensive B. anthracis reference,” Keim said. “We now know what the genome for this strain looks like, so if it ever occurs again, we will be able to pinpoint that this original came from the Soviet weapons program.”
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Guillain-Barré syndrome
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR's) (1882-1945) 1921 neurological disease revisited; the most likely diagnosis remains Guillain-Barré syndrome
Abstract
In 2003, we published evidence that the most likely cause of FDR's 1921 neurological disease was Guillain-Barré syndrome. Afterwards, several historians and neurologists stated in their publications that FDR had paralytic poliomyelitis. However, significant criticism of our article or new support for that diagnosis was not revealed. One critic claimed that FDR's cerebrospinal fluid indicated poliomyelitis, but we did not find evidence that a lumbar puncture was performed. The diagnosis of FDR's neurological disease still depends upon documented clinical abnormalities. His age, prolonged symmetric ascending paralysis, transient numbness, protracted dysaesthesia (pain on slight touch), facial paralysis, bladder and bowel dysfunction, and absence of meningismus are typical of Guillain-Barré syndrome and are inconsistent with paralytic poliomyelitis. FDR's prolonged fever was atypical for both diseases. Finally, permanent paralysis, though commoner in paralytic poliomyelitis, is frequent in Guillain-Barré syndrome. Thus, the clinical findings indicate the most likely diagnosis in FDR's case remains Guillain-Barré syndrome.
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10 incidents reported, including the Ebola virus in 2014 and anthrax in 2004, 2006, 2007, 2014 and 2015.
Government regulators have no idea how often laboratories working with some of the world’s most dangerous viruses and bacteria are failing to fully kill vials of specimens before sending them to other researchers who lack critical gear to protect them against infection, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
The risks to scientists, shipping companies and the public became the subject of international scrutiny last year when it was discovered that a U.S. Army lab in Utah had unwittingly made 575 shipments of still-live anthrax specimens – labeled as killed – to 194 labs and contractors around the world from 2004 through 2015.
Yet GAO investigators found it was impossible to determine how often this kind of problem occurs in public and private labs nationwide, in large part because the incident reporting forms used by federal regulators and other oversight agencies aren’t designed to capture and track this kind of problem. In addition, not all pathogens are covered by federal incident reporting requirements.
The result: Federal officials can’t easily search their databases, making it difficult for them to understand the magnitude of the problem, spot trends and ensure corrective actions are being taken to prevent future accidents, the GAO found.
Despite recent high-profile incidents involving failures to fully kill anthrax specimens at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City and at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters, the GAO in its latest report found federal oversight bodies lacked key information about how often such incidents occur. Nobody was sickened in either of those incidents. The GAO also found that gaps in scientific knowledge and a lack comprehensive guidance has resulted in varying practices in how individual labs go about killing specimens and labs applying “differing levels of rigor” in confirming the effectiveness of their methods.
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Newly disclosed CDC biolab failures 'like a screenplay for a disaster movie'
Encased in spacesuit-like gear needed to protect them from the world’s deadliest viruses, four scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stepped into their lab’s decontamination chamber where a shower of chemicals was supposed to kill anything on them and make it safe for them to exit into an adjacent changing room.
But the shower wouldn’t start, and warning lights appeared as a cascading series of safety systems began to fail inside one of the world’s most advanced biosafety level 4 labs. That's the highest level of containment and security, reserved for work with deadly Ebola and smallpox viruses and other pathogens that lack vaccines or reliable treatments.
The gasket seal around the exit door to the changing room deflated to the point that the scientists could see light coming in. And as they held that door shut and started an emergency chemical deluge, things got even worse.
The shower’s door back into the infectious disease lab “forcefully” burst open again and again – and they couldn’t even hold it shut. Meanwhile, air pressure alarms were blinking and monitors displayed the lab as “red,” according to records of the February 2009 incident recently obtained by USA TODAY under a Freedom of Information Act. The CDC took 3 ½ years to fulfill the request.
The records release comes as the CDC has faced two congressional hearings since a series of high-profile lab incidents in 2014 with anthrax, Ebola and a deadly strain of avian flu, and amid mounting concerns in Congress about the effectiveness of lab regulation and whether a lack of transparency keeps serious lab safety problems hidden from the public.
Despite the dramatic series of equipment failures in the 2009 CDC biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab incident, the newly released records include emails showing some within the agency sought at the time to avoid reporting to federal lab regulators in another division at the agency, though they eventually were notified.
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Ebola legacy lab will improve Sierra Leone’s resilience to future epidemics
The lab at the University of Makeni (UNIMAK) – a collaboration with the University of Cambridge supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust – will be officially opened today by Sierra Leonean Health Minister Dr Abu Bakarr Fofanah.
"Adapted from a press release from the Wellcome Trust"
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Finding the origin of human disease
RG: What happens in the lab?
Rifkin: "In the lab, following the extraction of vectors and parasitic eggs, we use a biomolecular approach to detect ancient pathogens. The Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics (CMEG) has considerable experience in studying extreme environments and has mastered the extraction of DNA from soils from the Namib Desert and Antarctica. And the application of these techniques to prehistoric sediments has already provided highly encouraging results. I then use DNA sequencing methods to detect pathogenic viruses, bacteria and other eukaryotic microbes in the samples."
One might ask why this photo of Rifkin at work from the interview shows lab conditions that are not BSL4. What happens if one of the unknown pathogns turns out to be a filovirus? These are exactly the conditions that caused the town of Marburg in Germany to be wiped out by a US biotech company.
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Hillary Clinton misstates Zika numbers
There were 7 cases of micrcephaly reported in Brazil and none since and none before. Zika is not a new virus and it less harmful than the flu. It has never once caused a birth defect. The doctors in Brazil state a pesticide caused the problem not mosquitoes.
Hillary Clinton Statement on the Senate Invoking Cloture on Bill to Fight the Zika Virus
"Hillary Clinton released the following statement on the 'invoking of cloture for a bill that would appropriate $1.1 billion in emergency funding to fight the Zika virus. This virus has already infected more than 1,200 people in the United States, with the biggest impact felt in Puerto Rico, and caused microcephaly in hundreds of thousands of babies born around the world'"
Again, there were seven (7) not "hundreds of thousands". Other cases brought into the US number a bit over 400. There's no particular Zika epidemic.
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