medicalcondition:anthrax

Inside the secret U.S. stockpile meant to save us all in a bioterror attack - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/24/inside-the-secret-u-s-stockpile-meant-to-save-us-all-in-a-bioterror-

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This is quite a different kind of warehouse. It and several others across the country are part of the $7 billion Strategic National Stockpile, a government repository of drugs and supplies ready for deployment in a bioterrorism or nuclear attack, or against an infectious disease outbreak — of either a known pathogen or some unknown threat with pandemic potential, which global health officials dub “Disease X” — or other major public health emergency. There are antibiotics, including the powerful medication Ciprofloxacin, vaccines for smallpox and anthrax and antivirals for a deadly influenza pandemic.

#Etats-Unis

Infected Monkeys and Other Cautionary Tales From the Biolab - Issue 24: Error
▻http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/infected-monkeys-and-other-cautionary-tales-from-the-biolab

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On May 27th, the Pentagon admitted that it had shipped live anthrax to facilities in multiple U.S. states, and to a U.S. airbase in South Korea—by accident. Anthrax is usually kept in highly secure biolabs with multiply redundant safeguards. But we’ve always known there is room for human error. The history of the biolab revolves around events like those of 1921, when two French scientists presented the world with a powerful weapon against tuberculosis. “The Great White Plague,” as it was called, had been infecting and killing humans with relative impunity for over 5,000 years before Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin unveiled their vaccine, composed of weakened tubercle bacteria. The vaccine caused mortality rates to fall, but its introduction was not without disaster. In 1930, a laboratory (...)

Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor’s biotech firm
▻http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-anthrax-resistant-20130519-dto,0,3192936.htmlstory

Biowarfare consultant Richard J. Danzig urged the government to stockpile a type of anthrax remedy. But he had a stake in one such drug’s success.

The U.S. and Chemical Weapons: No Leg to Stand On
▻http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_us_and_chemical_weapons_no_leg_to_stand_on

Israel is widely believed to have produced and stockpiled an extensive range of chemical weapons and is engaged in ongoing research and development of additional chemical weaponry. (Israel is also believed to maintain a sophisticated biological weapons program, which is widely thought to include anthrax and more advanced weaponized agents and other toxins, as well as a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal with sophisticated delivery systems.) For more than 45 years, the Syrians have witnessed successive U.S. administration provide massive amounts of armaments to a neighboring country with a vastly superior military capability which has invaded, occupied, and colonized Syria’s Golan province in the southwest. In 2007, the United States successfully pressured Israel to reject peace overtures from the Syrian government in which the Syrians offered to recognize Israel and agree to strict security guarantees in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory.

The U.S. position that Syria must unilaterally give up its chemical weapons and missiles while allowing a powerful and hostile neighbor to maintain and expand its sizable arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is simply unreasonable. No country, whether autocratic or democratic, could be expected to accept such conditions.

Scientists Dispute F.B.I. Closing of Anthrax Case - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/science/10anthrax.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1318248074-0wF5mVleOF

Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried #anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated. The scientists make their case in a coming issue of the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense.

Rebondissement dans l’affaire des enveloppes d’anthrax aux #États-unis

#armes_biologiques

Biodefence since 9/11: The price of protection | Nature News
►http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110907/full/477150a.html

Between 2001 and the end of this year, the federal government will have spent $60 billion on biodefence efforts, according to analyses from the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. The money has helped to modernize the nation’s crumbling public-health system, and BioShield has invested in a stockpile of 20 million doses of smallpox vaccine, 28.75 million doses of #anthrax vaccine and 1.98 million doses of four medicines to treat complications of smallpox, anthrax and botulism. But few researchers or policy-makers seem happy with an arsenal of six drugs that address only three of the potential threats — even if they are among the most serious. “The pipeline we rely on to provide those critical countermeasures — diagnostics, vaccines, antivirals, antibiotics — is full of leaks, choke points and dead ends,” said Kathleen Sebelius, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, in a statement last year.

Critics say that the effort has been hobbled by a lack of strategic thinking, focus and coordination between the federal agencies involved, and by unrealistic expectations of what the money could buy. “There was no evidence that they looked at what our top priorities are and asked, ’What’s needed on the basic-science side?’, ’What’s needed on the development side?’, and ’What’s needed in the stockpile?’,” says Andrew Pavia, an infectious-diseases doctor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Until earlier this year, Pavia served on the National Biodefense Science Board, which advises the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and in March last year released a report, Where Are The Countermeasures?, that was critical of the federal biodefence effort.

#armes #biologiques #etats-unis