While sitting in a boiling hot water bath in a Fort Detrick lab, a plastic tube holding a biological warfare agent popped open. Steam rose up out of the bath. A microbiologist walked into the room. And another. One stood in the room for 10 minutes as they discussed what to do, the stea… [More]

  The leader of the federal bioterrorism lab in which careless procedures may have exposed dozens of workers to live anthrax has resigned, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday. Michael Farrell, who had led the Bioterror Rapid Response and Advanced Technology La… [More]

  Sloppy handling of deadly viruses at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, including shipping a deadly virus to a lab by mistake, has spurred calls for an independent investigation of the agency. The head of of it concedes in a New York Times piece this morning there may be a “potential fo… [More]

  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “may never know” how a fairly harmless form of bird flu was cross-contaminated with a dangerous bird flu strain before it was sent to a laboratory outside of the CDC, an agency spokesman said on Monday. That’s because most of the materia… [More]

  US lawmakers said on Wednesday there was evidence of a “dangerous pattern” of safety lapses at government laboratories dealing with dangerous pathogens such as anthrax and avian flu that required a change in culture at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Members of a … [More]

  Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spent much of Wednesday completing a report that would let the public see, in embarrassing detail, how the sloppy handling of anthrax by scientists at its headquarters here had potentially exposed dozens of … [More]

  Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently discovered that at least 75 workers there had been exposed to possible anthrax infection. We should be glad that it was only anthrax. Anthrax is a dangerous but noncontagious bacterium; the risk to the exposed worke… [More]

A controversial scientist who carried out provocative research on making influenza viruses more infectious has completed his most dangerous experiment to date by deliberately creating a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of W… [More]

  As many as 75 scientists working in U.S. federal government laboratories in Atlanta may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria and are being offered treatment to prevent infection, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. The potential exposure occurred af… [More]

  Both the Boston City Council and the Massachusetts Superior Court yesterday took actions that move Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) closer to full operation. The City Council voted down a proposed ordinance that would have banned research… [More]