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T
oday's Headlines: December 14, 2018
Biological Agents & Infectious Diseases
Romaine E coli Probe Leads to Santa Barbara County Farm (CIDRAP) Federal health officials today said Adam Brothers Family Farms, based in Santa Barbara County, Calif., may be a source of romaine lettuce contaminated with Escherichia coli O157:H7, based on testing that matched the bacteria in irrigation water sediment to the outbreak strain that sickened patients. Go to article
Government Affairs & National Security
Biodefense Leader Kadlec Praises Schar School Program at 15th Anniversary Lecture (George Mason University - Schar School of Policy & Government) America's biodefense efforts began in 1777 when General George Washington, horrified at the prospect of losing a significant percentage of his troops to smallpox, ordered the Continental Army to be inoculated against the disease through a practice known as variolation. Washington, not surprisingly, was on to something. Biological threats have evolved dramatically since the 18th century as has our understanding of these threats and how to respond to them. Go to article
The New US Strategy to Tackle WMD Terrorism is New Wine in Old Wineskins
(War On the Rocks) Americans have long been obsessed with the notion that someday a terrorist will detonate a nuclear weapon within the US. In no small part, our own top defense experts have encouraged this view to motivate the government to take actions to prevent such an eventuality. Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on countering terrorism, senior defense leaders and politicians still grapple with the paralyzing scenario of a terrorist using a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon against the American public. Go to article
Science & Technology
China's History with AIDS Explains a Puzzling Aspect of the 'CRISPR Babies' Story (STAT) The first time I met someone in China dying from complications of AIDS, he had never heard of the illness that had already killed thousands of his fellow citizens. This was not the early 1980s, when the world was still stunned and stumped by the mystery virus that causes AIDS and its swift and deadly spread around the globe. It was 2007, barely more than a decade ago, in a rural village on the Chinese border with Myanmar, ground zero of China's first AIDS epidemic. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, first entered China from Myanmar, borne by the needles that accompanied a persistent regional heroin addiction. Go to article
New Report from Stanford Scholars Seeks to Demystify the Biosecurity Landscape (Stanford - Center for International Security & Cooperation) From genome editing to "hacking" the microbiome, advances in the life sciences and its associated technological revolution have already altered the biosecurity landscape, and will continue to do so. What does this new landscape look like, and how can policymakers and other stakeholders navigate this space? A new report by Stanford scholars David Relman and Megan Palmer along with George Mason University's Jesse Kirkpatrick and Greg Koblentz assesses this emerging biosecurity landscape to help answer these questions and illustrates gaps in governance and regulation through the use of scenarios. Go to article
FBI Plans 'Rapid DNA' Network for Quick Database Checks on Arrestees (Washington Post) Though DNA has revolutionized modern crime fighting, the clues it may hold are not revealed quickly. Samples of saliva, or skin, or semen are sent to a crime lab by car (or mail), and then chemists get to work. Detectives are accustomed to waiting days or weeks, or longer, for the results. Some labs are so backed up, they take only the most serious crimes. Some samples are never tested. Go to article
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