Marine Corps Times – A government agencyís ruling that the controversial anthrax vaccine is safe should clear the way for resumption of mandatory shots for military personnel, government attorneys argue in a new court filing.
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UPI – University of Central Florida scientists say they’ve found a safe and effective method of producing large quantities of anthrax vaccine. The researchers say enough anthrax vaccine to inoculate everyone in the United States could be grown inexpensively and safely with only one acre of tobacco plants.
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Associated Press – A former National Institutes of Health employee was sentenced Friday to house arrest and probation after admitting she made an anthrax threat over a tax dispute.
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Associated Press – The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday confirmed its previous finding that the anthrax vaccine being given to members of the U.S. military is safe and effective.
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Stuff.co.nz – Kiwi scientists are developing a new treatment for anthrax.
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Daily Press – In a two-year span, the nation’s only licensed anthrax vaccine maker went from pleading poverty to announcing $100 million in acquisitions, including other pharmaceutical companies and a new manufacturing plant near Washington, D.C.

It’s a pattern that’s worked well for BioPort Corp.: Tell the Pentagon or Congress that it doesn’t have the money to keep going, negotiate a new deal, then count the extra cash rolling in.
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Daily Press – The Pentagon never told Congress about more than 20,000 hospitalizations involving troops who’d taken the anthrax vaccine, despite repeated promises that such cases would be publicly disclosed.
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Associated Press – When an anthrax slide broke in an eighth grade science class two weeks ago, school officials locked down Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative Junior-Senior High School for four hours, with no explanation to terrified pupils, teachers or parents.
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Associated Press – The Bush administration asked a federal appeals court Thursday to reinstate mandatory anthrax inoculations for many military personnel.
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Science Daily [Infection and Immunity] – A new anthrax antibody engineered by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin protects and defends against inhalation anthrax without the use of antibiotics and other more expensive antibodies.
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Newsday – America’s homeland defense program is spending more than $1 billion on anthrax vaccines earmarked for wide civilian use despite uncertainty about their effectiveness and an ongoing debate about potential health problems.
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Reuters – Equipment that screens mail for the Defense Department detected possible trace amounts of a deadly toxin last weekend but later tests showed it was a false alarm.
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Medical News Today [PloS Pathogen] – Scientists have discovered why lung, but not skin, anthrax infections are lethal. Neutrophils play a key role in anthrax infections.
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Christian Science Monitor – A recent decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is an ironic reminder that one of the greatest whodunits in recent history remains a threat to the safety of Americans. Steven Hatfill, the man labeled a “person of interest” in the anthrax investigation, has been allowed to go forward with his defamation suit against The New York Times.
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Newsweek – Just as President George W. Bush is launching an ambitious plan to guard against an avian flu pandemic, an administration program to prepare for a potential anthrax attack is running into new and unexpected hurdles. VaxGen Inc., a California biotech firm that last year was awarded an $877.5 million contract to supply a newly invented, and so far unlicensed, anthrax vaccine, acknowledged this week that it won’t begin to start deliveries to the federal government until the latter part of next yearósix months later than it originally intended.
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UPI – Preliminary studies show serious and potential life-threatening problems with a potential anthrax treatment the U.S. government is developing. Anthrax immune globulin, which the government is developing as a possible treatment in the event of a bioterror attack, protects animals from death if given prior to exposure to toxins from Bacillus anthracis, the anthrax bacterium, but if the compound is formulated incorrectly it can be fatal and it did not prevent death when given after exposure.
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UN IRIN – Anthrax is spreading in southern Kyrgyzstan, where upwards of two dozen cases have been registered over the past few months.
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CIDRAP – Recent US government contracts to test two experimental anthrax drugs could lead to the purchase of up to 100,000 doses of each.
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Associated Press – The Department of Health and Human Services has signed a deal that could include an order for 100,000 doses of a drug to treat anthrax once it has entered the body, part of the federal government’s push to stockpile drugs to counter the lethal germ.
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The Register – The US Army has asked companies to bid for contracts to produce large quantities of anthrax and equipment to produce other unnamed biological agents, according to New Scientist, but has not said what it needs the facilities for.
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New York Times – An update on the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001. In short, still no progress???
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Medical News Today [Journal of Infectious Disease] – University of Florida researchers have uncovered how the inhaled form of anthrax disarms bacteria-fighting white blood cells before they can fend off the disease, which kills most victims within days???The lethal toxin in anthrax paralyzes neutrophils, the white blood cells that act as the body’s first defense against infection, by impairing how they build tiny filaments that allow them to crawl throughout the body and eat invading bacteria.
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Eureka Alert [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] – Surprising new insights about the acid pH levels required for anthrax toxin to invade the cells of the body may help accelerate development of medications for the treatment of anthrax.
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News-Medical.Net – A method for identifying Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax, has been cleared for diagnostic use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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Medical News Today [Journal of Biological Chemistry] – A new laboratory method for quickly detecting active anthrax proteins within an infected blood sample at extremely low levels has been developed by researchers.
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San Diego Union Tribune – Marines and sailors at Camp Pendleton are volunteering to get anthrax vaccine shots at a much higher rate than the overall military’s average.
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Associated Press – A University of Texas Medical Branch microbiologist who faced scrutiny for claiming that a Dallas company’s anthrax protection lotion would protect the public from anthrax has resigned.
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Reuters – Two Russian butchers in the southern Siberian region of Altai were suspected of having contracted anthrax on Monday after slaughtering an infected cow.
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The Times – A British cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussainís ìweapons of mass destructionî programme that led to the Iraq war.
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Agence France Presse – One person has died and up to 11 more are in hospital after being infected with anthrax from coming into contact with infected cows in northeast China’s Liaoning province.
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Medical News Today [Nature] – Researchers have shown that anthrax lethal factor (LF) impairs the function of dendritic cells and thereby compromises the immune system’s ability to fight the microbe. The findings have implications for developing more effective anthrax therapies.
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Reuters – A human monoclonal antibody against the agent that causes anthrax (Bacillus anthracis protective antigen), which has shown action against inhaled anthrax in animals, appears to be safe and well tolerated in humans as well, researchers report.
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Reuters – Nearly three dozen people have been diagnosed with anthrax infection in eastern Turkey after eating contaminated meat, prompting authorities to quarantine their village.
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Associated Press – A North Texas businessman peddling a lotion he claims can protect the public from anthrax has garnered support from a veteran congressman, a respected police chief and a microbiologist at a University of Texas branch known for bioterrorism research.

But an investigation by The Dallas Morning News shows the company appears to be built on little more than shaky science and the long-standing friendships of the man’s father. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says Bio-Germ lacks federal approval and could face scrutiny for claims made on its Web site.
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Kansas City Star – The governmentís effort to develop a new vaccine against anthrax has raised red flags among critics over plans to eventually test an experimental version on children.
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News-Medical.net [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] – A collaborative team of scientists has identified inhibitors of the anthrax toxin, termed lethal factor (”LF”) that could be developed into an emergency treatment for exposure to inhalation anthrax.
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ITAR-TASS – A villager was taken to hospital in southern Kazakhstan Saturday with symptoms suggestive of anthrax, sources at the Kazakhstani Ministry for Emergency Situations said.
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Medical News Today [Infection and Immunity] – A newly identified inhibitor of the anthrax toxin may be used to develop a safer and more effective vaccine and act as a therapeutic agent after exposure.
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Washington Times – Three years and eight months after the anthrax attacks of October 2001, the civilian vaccine stockpile finally got its first doses of anthrax vaccine. The doses arrived a few weeks ago, a federal official revealed in congressional testimony Tuesday, shortly after industry officials and congressmen turned up the heat on the Department of Health and Human Services to show some tangible progress in building up the vaccine stockpile. The result: A stockpile that can cover about 170,000 people, which is not even enough for Des Moines, Iowa. Federal officials anticipate that the bulk of vaccine they are counting on to build the stockpile won’t start arriving until 2006 at earliest, and possibly not until 2008. The story of why the stockpile remains so small nearly four years after the attacks is an object lesson in the disappointing politics and science of biodefense.
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Xinhua – Anthrax has killed an elderly woman and affected 23 people in west India’s Orissa Pradesh in the past three days.
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CIDRAP – An anthrax outbreak in the small African country of Guinea Bissau has killed 4 people and sickened more than 80.
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The Herald – An anthrax outbreak in humans has resurfaced in Gutu district in Masvingo, Zimbabwe, with five cases having been reported since the beginning of last week and reports that the disease has claimed one person in the district.

Health officials in Gutu said they were still investigating the death of one person who died recently after eating some beef suspected to have been contaminated with anthrax.

The resurgence of anthrax in Gutu comes a few months after the province had successfully managed to tame the disease that had also resulted in the death of hundreds of livestock; mainly cattle.
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New York Times – During the anthrax mail attacks in 2001, Bill Paliscak, a gung-ho, hockey-playing postal investigator who had missed 3 days of work in 11 years, removed a filthy filter above a mail-sorting machine to preserve it as evidence. Anthrax-laden dust showered down on him. Four days later he began to feel feverish. Soon he was in intensive care. After spending the next three years in and out of the hospital, Mr. Paliscak, 41, now needs a wheelchair to move about, sleeps with a breathing device to get enough oxygen and takes dozens of pills a day???Yet Mr. Paliscak (pronounced PAL-uh-sack) remains a medical puzzle. Blood tests never detected the bacteria that cause anthrax or the antibodies the immune system should produce in response. As a result, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention never classified his disease with the 11 confirmed cases of inhalational anthrax, 5 of them fatal.
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National Defense University – The U.S. government continues to improve its plans for protecting civilians and soldiers from attacks with biological weapons. Part of this effort focuses on developing strategies that recognize the difficult choices to be made in using and deploying resources. This paper presents a risk- and decision-based frameworkóderived from the field of Bayesian statisticsófor developing strategies that facilitate managing the risks of biological agents???The authors conclude that the government should adopt a processóbased on decision science and using the power of decision trees as an analytical toolóto develop a strategy for managing the risks of bioterrorism.
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Associated Press – A Michigan company was selected Friday to manufacture 5 million doses of anthrax vaccine as part of a federal program – Project Bioshield – to stockpile antidotes to biological and chemical weapons.
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Associated Press – The military will resume giving the anthrax vaccine to volunteers as soon as this week.
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[Annals of Internal Medicine] – In the event of an aerosolized B. anthracis bioweapon attack over an unvaccinated metropolitan U.S. population, postattack prophylactic vaccination and antibiotic therapy is the most effective and least expensive strategy.
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CIDRAP – The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says federal agencies may not be able to reliably rule out the presence of anthrax contamination in a building because their sampling and detection methods have not been adequately tested.
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Associated Press – The Pentagon can resume giving anthrax vaccinations, but only to troops who volunteer for them, said a federal judge who had banned the shots amid safety questions.
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Washington Post – Despite the nation’s deadly 2001 experience with anthrax in the mail, federal scientists have not agreed on a method to determine whether workplaces, postal facilities or other sites that might have been exposed are free of contamination, according to a congressional study.
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