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Nina Pham, one of the two nurses who contracted Ebola in Dallas, is expected to be moved to a National Institutes of Health isolation unit in Bethesda, Maryland, a federal official with direct knowledge of the plans told NBC News on Thursday. The transfer could happen later Thursday, but the official cautioned that plans were evolving. Pham, 26, was diagnosed with the virus on Sunday after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who contracted Ebola in Liberia, flew to Dallas and later died. The other nurse who contracted Ebola in Dallas, Amber Vinson, was flown on Wednesday to Emory University Hospital in...

Public Health: The man whose one job is to safeguard America's health has failed, saying that we must change our responses to Ebola after a Dallas health care worker becomes infected despite the rules he championed. After 26-year-old Dallas health care worker Nina Pham became the first person to contract Ebola on U.S. soil, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), said during a press conference that (we) "have to rethink the way we address Ebola control." Yes, we do. Pham's infection, just as Thomas E. Duncan's death in Dallas after a multistop trip from Liberia,...

... What’s particularly interesting about this discussion, then, is that nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding...

The NIH budget included $2.4 million for a new condom design whose inventor is now being investigated for fraud Another $939,000 taught scientists that male fruit flies prefer younger females $257,000 went to create a companion website for first lady Michelle Obama's White House garden It cost $592,000 to determine that chimpanzees with the best poop-flinging skills are also the best communicators, and another $117,000 to learn that most chimps are right-handed NIH director Dr. Francis Collins complained Sunday that a lack of funding is behind his agency's failure to produce an Ebola vaccine in time to combat this year's...

As I’m sure you know, former White House Chief of Staff and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel once quipped, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” And you don’t get a much better crisis than Ebola. The progressive socialists of the Democrat Party are milking it for all its worth, as they see their hopes sinking for the midterm elections. As reported by The Huffington Post “As the federal government frantically works to combat the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and as it responds to a second diagnosis of the disease at home, one of the country’s top health...

It didn't take long for Democrats to try to pin the blame for the spreading Ebola crisis on Republican-imposed "budget cuts." The effort clearly smacks of desperation. But it also happens to be completely false.

(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...