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(in the US to deflect attention from their across the board failures as we head into the final stretch of an election?) We have troops heading to ground zero in the current Ebola outbreak (and if anyone is infected - it is a guaranteed headline over several news cycles), we have an infected nurse here at home and a near-constant stream of news about folks here, there and everywhere being tested for the disease. We have children dead from enterovirus and in all of this, our government has shown no desire to shut down our borders and the entry of...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Friday he remains deeply skeptical about President Obama’s ability to prevent an Ebola outbreak in the U.S., claiming that federal health officials are still underplaying the risks. Paul said while he doesn’t want the government to incite panic over Ebola, he doesn’t believe the administration has been entirely transparent about the threat. "I understand people in government not wanting to create panic, and I don't want to create panic, either. But I think it's also a mistake on the other side of the coin to underplay the risk of this,” Paul told CNN's Wolf Blitzer....

An American doctor exposed to Ebola while in Sierra Leone has been flown to the United States. The doctor was flown to a regional airport in the eastern state of Maryland Sunday and walked off the plane wearing a white protective suit. The infectious disease chief at the NIH near Washington would not discuss details about the patient, but said that in general, an exposure to Ebola doesn't necessarily mean someone will become sick.

Physician will be admitted to National Institutes of Health unit in Maryland. The patient, who has not been named, was volunteering in Sierra Leone . Expected to arrive at isolation center in Bethesda in the next few days. Agency says the action is being taken 'out of an abundance of caution'. Comes as third US victim of the disease celebrates a full recovery . An American doctor will be treated for Ebola after being exposed to the virus while volunteering in Sierra Leone. The physician, who has not been named, is expected be admitted for observation and clinical trials at...

Is the government monkeying around on your dime? The National Institutes of Health is reportedly spending $3.9 million over five years to study the effects of excessive drinking on monkeys. …

About two weeks after he went missing, police announced an NIH scientist has been found dead in his car. Martin John Rogers, 54, left his Gaithersburg home around 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 21 to go to work. As he was leaving, he told his wife of 25 years that he was going to a meeting -- but his co-workers said he never showed up to work that morning./SNIP/ Martin Rogers had worked at the National Institutes of Health for 15 years and specialized in tropical diseases.

Britons are to be the first in the world to test a new vaccine against the deadly ebola virus. Altogether 60 healthy volunteers will be given the vaccine next month in a trial led by Oxford University scientists. If the vaccine performs as well in humans as in monkeys, the trial will be extended to 80 people in The Gambia and in Mali. The entire trial programme is being fast-tracked – subject to ethical approval – with the intention of using the vaccine in people at high risk in West Africa early next year. Latest figures show that more than...

The National Institutes of Health announced today that it will begin testing an Ebola vaccine on humans starting next week — efforts that were expedited in response to the outbreak tearing through West Africa. “We have accelerated the timeline for testing experimental Ebola vaccines that we have been developing for several years,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, during a phone conference today. The study is “the first step in developing a vaccine that could be licensed and used in the field to protect not only front-line health care...

A tiny company in Sorrento Mesa helped develop the serum that may have saved the lives of two American aid workers stricken with the Ebola virus in Liberia in recent days. Mapp Biopharmaceutical and its experimental ZMapp product were virtually unknown until Monday, when word spread of the serum that seems to have stabilized Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol. Now the biotech firm is being publicly mentioned by everyone from health officials in numerous countries, to news organizations worldwide, to social-media users. The spotlight is also being cast on The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, where scientist...

After back-to-back potentially serious laboratory accidents, federal health officials announced on Friday that they had closed the flu and anthrax laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and have halted shipments of all infectious agents from the agency’s highest-security labs. The accidents, and the C.D.C.'s emphatic response to them, could have important implications for other laboratories around the world engaged in research into dangerous viruses and bacteria. If the C.D.C — which the agency’s director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called “the reference laboratory to the world” — had multiple accidents that could have, in theory, killed not just laboratory...

Federal officials are defending an unconscionable act. Between 2005 and 2009, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) supported research on 1,316 premature newborns without requiring parents to be told their baby could die and the baby's oxygen monitor would not show their child's true oxygen level - a violation of their own ethics rules, reports Sharyl Attkisson at The Daily Signal. The experiment was carried out on premature infants at 22 sites. The purpose: to determine how much supplemental oxygen premies should receive. According to NIH, 28,000 premies are born each year out of 3.9 million births, with 14,000 -...

The white-marble Rayburn House Office Building, in Washington DC, looks like a giant courts building or a central bank, fully intimidating and imposing in its hulking stony blockiness. And the US Congress, of course, is an institution best known for its tedium, albeit a tedium that is regularly punctuated by fiery partisan combat. On a typical day, the Rayburn building--acronymed as RHOB--is a place where politicos and bureaucrats struggle for and against some special interest, yea or nay, on regulation or appropriation. And the biggest single activity in RHOB, or in any of the other five office edifices on Capitol...

The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the “remarkably dysfunctional” federal bureaucracy. David Wright, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), writes in a scathing resignation letter obtained by ScienceInsider that the huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI “the very worst job I have ever had.” ORI, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), monitors alleged research misconduct by researchers funded by the National Institutes of...

The National Institutes of Health has spent millions of dollars studying male sex workers in Peru, including more than $400,000 to determine why gay men get syphilis in the South American country. “Syphilis remains an uncontrolled infectious disease globally, with high prevalence and incidence in certain high risk populations, affecting more than 20 percent of men who have sex with men (MSM) in Peru,” according to the grant, awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “The incidence of syphilis in MSM in Peru is about 9 cases per 100 person-years,” it said. “We are proposing a study to improve...

An elderly woman was left on the floor at a care home for up to ten minutes because a nurse was praying, an inquest heard. Alzheimer's sufferer Dorothy Griffiths, 87, was found sitting down after staff heard a bang and a carer went to the office for help to lift her. But agency nurse Abdul Bhutto, who was in charge, said they would have to wait. Carer Zoe Shaw told the Sheffield hearing: "It took between five and ten minutes because he was praying upstairs in the office on his prayer mat. A staff member told me we had to...

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said. The bogus findings helped Han’s team obtain $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said James Bradac, who oversees the institutes’ AIDS research.

Obama — propelled by the Newtown school shootings — urged Congress in January to provide $10 million to finance fresh academic investigations into the impacts of firearms on the collective health of Americans. "NIH has been supporting research on violence and its implications for health for many years. The violence resulting from firearms was included" in past studies, The CDC this year asked the Institute of Medicine to convene a committee to identify the most pressing research questions on gun violence.

The Obama administration is shifting $100 million into research efforts aimed at curing HIV, President Obama announced Monday. A new initiative at the National Institutes of Health will be aimed at "advanc[ing] research toward an HIV cure," Obama said at a White House event marking World AIDS Day, which was Sunday. The initiative is aimed at developing "new therapies," he said. "The United States should be at the forefront of the discoveries how to put HIV in long-term remission without requiring lifelong therapies. Or, better yet, eliminate it completely."

(CNSNews.com) – The Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health has suspended its dog therapy program because of the government shutdown, according to John Burklow, spokesperson for NIH. Burklow said the dogs, which pay visits to patients in the hospital, including children with cancer, have to seen by veterinarians, and a “team” on staff made the decision to suspend program. “A vet needs to evaluate the dogs, and given that there is a 25 percent reduction in staff (furloughed), we focus our activities and staffing on the care of patients already at our hospital,” Burklow said.

(CNSNews.com) – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is soliciting applications for federal grants worth up to $275,000 to research ways to provide elderly patients with “palliative care” – even in hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units. Palliative care is commonly understood to mean medical treatment that focuses on relieving symptoms, including pain, instead of trying to treat or cure the underlying disease. But researchers will not be studying the use of palliative care to relieve the suffering of dying patients. “Hospice and end-of-life settings are not included within the scope” of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the grant...