CDC Director Calls for another COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW of lab safety six months after the last one

       UPDATE:   575 shipments, 192 total labs received live, incompletely irradiated Dugway anthrax.  Congressional hearing held 7/28/15. (The subjects in my Cheer! below are among those mentioned by USAT on July 21, 2015–Nass) The CDC Cheer  When anthrax spores are flying through its halls, whaddaya do? You know what to do:  It’s a…

21st Century Cures Act Dismantles Meaningful Federal Regulation of Drugs and Devices

The 21st Century Cures Act was passed (unanimously) out of Committee on July 7, 2015 and passed by the House on July 10, by a vote of 344 to 77.   It could have been called the Stealth Act:  There was very little preceding discussion of this bill, despite its potentially huge effects on US…

How Not to Fix the F.D.A./ NYT explains that the Cure is Worse than the Disease: 21st Century Cures Act passes House

Another giveaway to health industries (and woe to patients) is embodied in the so-called 21st Century Cures Act.   It passed the House of Representatives this week before you knew it existed. Usually industry’s best friend, the NY Times surprisingly editorialized against this shameful bill today.  Here is what the Times wrote: “A bill passed by…

U.S. Health Department *Retracts* Statement on Emergent (anthrax vaccine mfr) getting an Ebola contract/ Bloomberg and WaPo

DHHS tells Bloomberg/WaPo it made a mistake about giving that Ebola drug contract to the anthrax vaccine manufacturer. Crayton HarrisonJul 16, 2015 4:40 pm ET (Source retracts statement cited in July 15 story.) “This release was sent in error as the contract has not been signed by all parties,” the agency said in a separate…

USG gives contract to anthrax vaccine manufacturer to develop an Ebola drug/ Bloomberg

Recall that the current anthrax vaccine manufacturer has never developed and brought to market a single drug.  The anthrax vaccine was developed by the US army.  The company has purchased other companies, such as Cangene, that do have a few marketable products, though the market for them is small. It is also marketing a nerve gas decontamination skin…

XKeyscore/ The Intercept

What information exactly does the NSA (and its Five Eyes partners) have access to?  At least as much as noted below.  How long is the information stored?  Maybe that is a function of the storage available, which we know is increasing rapidly. From The Intercept: One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of…

CDC Says USA Today Will Have to Wait 3 Years to Learn About CDC’s Pathogen Mishandling

From USA Today:  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which has publicly disclosed three serious laboratory accidents during the past year involving Ebola, anthrax and a deadly strain of bird flu — says it will take three more years before it will release copies of all incident reports for the agency’s labs in Atlanta and Fort…

Public Health Gone Awry: Birth Dose of Hepatitis B Vaccine (IOM chimes in on lack of good vaccine data)

Hepatitis B is a serious disease.  It is highly prevalent in many countries in Asia (nearly 10% of Chinese carried the illness in 1992), but fortunately is of low prevalence in the US.  Per CDC, the overall reported US incidence rate for 2013 was 1.0 case per 100,000 population. After adjusting for under-ascertainment and under-reporting,…

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