Centers for Disease Control news from FierceBioResearcher

A strain of bird flu has adapted to create a new version which increases the chances of a human pandemic, according to scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Read more...

A growing demand for new biotech and lab space is forcing up rents in the Washington DC area as vacancies decline. Rockville, MD-based Scheer Partners expects vacancies to drop from 8 percent this Read more...

Before the 2001 anthrax attacks, the U.S. had only two biosafety level 4 (BSL4) labs, which conduct Read more...

Over the course of three years, inspectors from the CDC found a raft of problems at Texas A&M's biodefense laboratory. Lethal agents and infected animals weren't properly guarded, unauthorized Read more...

An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK has been contained after a government report pinned the blame for the outbreak on leaky pipes at the Institute for Animal Health's Pirbright site. Read more...

More Research

In a discovery expected to lead to new drugs to treat hemorrhagic fevers, researchers at the CDC say they have found the mechanism by which Ebola and Marburg viruses cause disease. Report

Adding further evidence of the tonic qualities provided by moderate amounts of red wine, researchers have determined that one of the compounds …

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In a move clearly designed to put pressure on Asian countries to release the sequences of lethal H5N1 viruses, the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. has posted some 650 flu virus sequences on a public database. That U.S. database included only the seasonal and animal viruses identified inside the U.S. The CDC wants Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and China to follow suit with public postings of their own. Indonesia recently agreed to disseminate …

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Scientists at the CDC reported a project failure late last week that many researchers in the field were only too happy to see. They engineered genetic changes to see if they could make the deadly A-H5N1 virus more easily transmittable among people. It didn't work. That doesn't mean that the virus, which has claimed 134 lives, can't mutate into a virus that could trigger a human pandemic. But it does mean that a mutation probably won't happen easily.

Undertaking their work in a …

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