Canberra, Australia’s capital, has about 365,000 people and has a medical school. Its health staff totals 5,122 people. Only 48% were vaccinated against the flu this year, down from 60% during the swine flu pandemic of 2009. But is this a problem? ACT Health said there have been fewer than five deaths a year for…
As has been noted previously, vaccination is a black art, basically a trial and error process of discovery, which has the potential to either prevent or enhance disease, and therefore must be studied carefully before vaccines are administered to large populations, despite issues of expediency. Vet Pathol. 2012 Mar 28. Kinetics of Lung Lesion Development…
Ellen Nakashima at the Post reports that Charles Grassley has evidence the Office of General Counsel at FDA authorized extensive spy probe of disgruntled employeess, Congressional offices and media. This suggests authorization came from the highest levels at FDA: “Congressional investigators said Monday that the chief counsel’s office at the Food and Drug Administration authorized wide-ranging…
One CDC high-containment lab (BSL-3, the level of containment required to study anthrax) fails to contain air efflux. And it was discovered because visitors touring the facility saw a puff of air exit through a slot in a door window. How long had this been going on? USAToday points out that the BSL-3 lab doors…
The FDA, reprising the Justice Department, had its own criminal enterprise going. Using commercial $99.95 spy software, it was able to illegally read emails of its employees, members of Congress and their staffs, and journalists, and much more. Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane of the NY Times report, although who authorized the illegal surveillance and who…
The FBI crime lab seems to have been run as an illegal enterprise to support desired convictions–evidence be damned–for decades. Maybe justice will now be served for some of those convicted as a result of FBI criminality. This story didn’t just come out. There was a Justice Department review years ago… which let the original…
From Wired and ScienceNOW comes this very worrisome piece about how two different, attenuated live virus vaccines for infectious laryngotracheitis in chickens recombined to form a virus twice as deadly as the disease the vaccines were intended to prevent. (The death rate in chickens increased from 8% to 17%.) Chickens in multiple parts of Australia were…
According to Reuters, the US ranks close to the bottom on a number of healthcare indices, compared to the 33 other countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Of course, the US ranks at the top in terms of cost: 17.9% of GDP is spent on healthcare in the US. There is…
From the NY Times: In the largest settlement involving a pharmaceutical company, the British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $3 billion in fines for promoting its best-selling antidepressants for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a top diabetes drug, federal prosecutors announced Monday. The agreement also…
From Eric Lichtblau at the NY Times: WASHINGTON — In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations. The cellphone carriers’ reports,…
David Willman does another deft job with the story of BioWatch, hopefully in time to influence the upcoming purchase of BioWatch’s next generation of detectors. None have yet worked as billed. The “detectors” are simply air samplers: filters attached to vacuum tubes. The filters have to be collected, then tested elsewhere using PCR devices specific…
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