Flu..

 

Accidents do happen. In 2011 the US National Research Council reported 196 “loss of containment” incidents involving dangerous pathogens between 2003 and 2009 at US government labs.

Today Mark Lipsitch of Harvard University and Alison Galvani of Yale University published a critique of gain-of-function flu work that emphasized the risk of lab escapes.

“While such a release is unlikely in a specific laboratory conducting research under strict biosafety procedures,” they write, “even a low likelihood should be taken seriously, given the scale of destruction if such an unlikely event were to occur.”

If this type of problem can happen at a CDC lab, it points out the issues regarding gain-of-function lab accidents,” says Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In reply, flu virologists have insisted that they use very stringent safety procedures.

The incident has rattled critics of “gain of function” experiments with flu, because they can turn flu that does not pose a pandemic threat into a virus that could. Unlike anthrax such flu is highly contagious, and harder to kill with drugs.

They say that such work is unethical if whatever public health benefit it provides can be obtained with less-dangerous experiments – or just by investing in better vaccines.

Exposed..

 

Seventy-five lab workers may have been exposed to anthrax at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, the leading US lab for tracking infectious disease.  

According to the CDC, culture dishes of anthrax bacteria kept in a level 3 high-containment lab, were subjected to a treatment that should have killed them. Even though the treatment was reportedly experimental, the dishes were sent to a level 2 lower containment lab in the same building, to help develop detectors for environmental anthrax.

Workers there did not use heavy protective gear for procedures that could have spritzed the bacteria into the air as the anthrax was supposed to be dead. But few days later, when the dishes were being gathered for disposal, a live anthrax culture was growing on one.

People exposed have been given the anthrax vaccine and ciprofloxacin, the antibiotic that prevented illness when anthrax was sent to US government and media offices in 2001.  

Try it..

 

Trail..

Free..

 

Down..

 

Pox..

 

In 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in the wild.   

That moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30 percent of those who contracted it from the face of the earth.    Around 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.

But in 1978, the disease cropped back up in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. Janet Parker was a photographer at Birmingham Medical School. When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chicken pox. After all, everyone knew that smallpox had been chased out of the world.

Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital, where testing determined that she had smallpox after all. She died of it a few weeks later.

It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. 

Some papers reported that the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.) 

Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic.

Photo OP.

 

Lukewarm .

 

Biden seemed, to many, to be the man who could provide it, the man who could loosen Trump’s stranglehold on our society. 

Democrats were afraid to take too much of a chance with their nominee. Wanting too much, let alone demanding it, felt dangerous.

So we settled on the elder statesman. The straight white man. The middle-of-the-roader: not too hot, not too cold, lukewarm.

He was the “scrappy kid from Scranton,” the unapologetic “union man” who could win back the pixies of politics: the working-class white voters who could back Barack Obama in one election and Trump in the next.

Biden pitched electability moderation rather than transformation and voters liked it.

However, now there is a new realization. 

There is a hardening perception that the president isn’t even being silently productive, but voiceless and vacant.

A new poll from Morning Consult and Politico finds that 42 percent of registered voters say that Biden has accomplished less than they expected. More than a quarter of Democrats felt this way.

Target..

 

A leading expert who helped create the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine said giving everyone in the world booster shots multiple times a year is not feasible.

"We can't vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It's not sustainable or affordable," Professor Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and head of the UK's Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Tuesday.

Pollard also stressed the "need to target the vulnerable" going forward, rather than administering doses to everyone age 12 and older. 

More data is needed to ascertain "whether, when and how often those who are vulnerable will need additional doses," 

Pollard also said he thought further evidence was needed before offering a fourth Covid-19 shot to people in the UK, which is currently rolling out third shots to healthy people 18 and older, and at-risk people 16 and older.