Better Info on H1N1: Cidrap at U. Minnesota

Op-Ed piece by Col. Lawrence Sellin, Ret. …Reinforced by a number of armchair detectives from academia, the FBI produced a profile of the anthrax mailer who was described as a lone person living within the United States, who had experience working in labs and was smart enough to produce a highly refined and deadly product. …

From the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity comes this short report, a reiteration that the spores in the anthrax letters could not have come directly from those prepared by Bruce Ivins at Fort Detrick, as they lacked two substances contained in the RMR1029 anthrax spore collection. Thanks to Ross Getman for the citation. Additional…

The BBC reports:  The UK has lowered its worst-case scenario estimate of possible swine flu-related deaths from 65,000 to 19,000.  Seventy people have died so far in the UK, while 6,000 to 8,000 die yearly from seasonal flu.    Advisors have now agreed that the swine flu death rate is lower than previously thought, likely to…

 From the Washington Post: The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. … what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy…

Nature Medicine ran a 3 page article that claimed to explain why the novel coronavirus is not a lab construct.  USA Today wrote a summary piece explaining it: “If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,”…