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U.S. Food Supply New Target for Terrorists Monday, October 24, 2005 •Report: Terrorists May Target Milk Supply WASHINGTON — Buildings, trains, ships and, now, the U.S. food supply are all potential targets that the U.S. government is trying to protect from a possible terrorist attack. Ever since plans to attack American agriculture were found in the caves of Afghanistan, Homeland Security (search) has been planning for an assault on the nation's meat and milk supply or an attempt to contaminate the seeds used to grow vegetables. Please click on the video box on the right to watch a full report...

While official Washington has been poring over Harriet Miers’ long-ago doings on the Dallas City Council and parsing the Byzantine comings and goings of the Fitzgerald grand jury, relatively unnoticed was perhaps the most momentous event of our lifetime — what is left of it, as I shall explain. It was announced that American scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 “Spanish” flu. This is big. Very big. First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a story...

THE growing threat of lethal bird flu spreading across Europe will soar to the top of EU leaders' menu this week, after the deadly Asian strain of the virus landed on the continent for the first time. Scientists and the European Union's political chiefs are battling to allay public panic after the H5N1 virus was confirmed in Romania at the weekend, only two days after its presence was identified in Turkey. EU foreign ministers will discuss the outbreak at emergency talks in Luxembourg Tuesday, while the bird flu scare will inevitably dominate the agenda of a meeting of EU health...

Good Health Habits Good health habits are also an important way to help prevent the Flu. Avoid close contact. Avoid close contact with people who are sick. When you are sick, keep your distance from others to protect them from getting sick too. Stay home when you are sick. If possible, stay home from work, school, and errands when you are sick. You will help prevent others from catching your illness. Cover your mouth and nose. Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing. It may prevent those around you from getting sick. Clean your...

Bird flu 'will kill 50,000 people, but not this year' By David Derbyshire (Filed: 17/10/2005) A bird flu pandemic would kill about 50,000 people in Britain but will not necessarily strike this winter, the Government's chief medical officer said yesterday. Sir Liam Donaldson said that it was a question of "when, not if" the disease infecting birds in Asia and the fringes of eastern Europe mutated into a deadly form of human influenza. Sir Liam: deaths could be higher than 50,000 The number of deaths in Britain could reach 750,000 if the human strain were particularly serious, although a lower...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is scrambling to prepare the nation for a possible global rampage by a new flu germ that it fears could kill nearly 2 million Americans, sicken tens of millions more and shatter the economy. The key question is how much preparation can be done before a calamity strikes that, in a worst-case scenario, could make the health system collapse; overwhelm morgues; close schools, airports and harbors; end public gatherings; require strict quarantines; and cripple businesses and vital public services by mass absenteeism. "You're looking at a nation-busting event," warned Tara O'Toole, director of the Center...

AP SCIENCE WRITER NEW YORK -- Bird flu virus found in a Vietnamese girl was resistant to the main drug that's being stockpiled in case of a pandemic, a sign that it's important to keep a second drug on hand as well, a researcher said Friday. He said the finding was no reason to panic. The drug in question, Tamiflu, still attacks "the vast majority of the viruses out there," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The drug, produced by Swiss-based Roche Holding AG, is in short supply as nations around the world...

Washington--From North Dakota to Texas, cattle have been dying by the hundreds from what some claim is the largest anthrax outbreak on record. Vaccination is an effecient, effective defense, experts say. At presstime, North Dakota officials estimated 500 dead bison and cattle and 101 quarantined premises. South Dakota claims at least 400 cattle have died from anthrax exposure on 53 premises. In Texas, two ranches were quarantined following antrax detection among deer, cattle and horses. Although the term "anthrax" often incites bioterrorism fears, the naturally occurring bacterial spore is endemic from the Gulf of Mexico through the Great Plains, experts...

BART said it was increasing security today in response to reports of a threat against the New York subway system. The system has operated on a heightened security alert, level orange, since the first London subway attack on July 7. After learning of the New York threat, BART said it was going on "an enhanced heightened alert." Bathrooms at underground stations, which have been closed since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, remain locked. BART says it worries that chemical or biological poisons could be spread into an underground station through a bathroom's ventilation system. San Francisco Municipal...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Avian flu will mutate and become transmissible by humans and the world has no time to lose to stop it becoming a pandemic, the head of the U.N. World Health Organization said on Thursday. Lee Jong-wook, a South Korean doctor, delivered his stark warning as the United States worked to rally states behind a new U.S. plan to fight the disease, which has already killed more than 60 people in Asia and spread to Russia and Europe. "Human influenza is coming, we know that, and no government, no leaders can afford to be caught off-guard," Lee...

Government scientists who want to find out how fast and far a chemical attack could move through a city will release colorless, harmless gases in subways, an office building and some of Manhattan's most crowded streets to see which way the wind blows them. Ultimately scientists hope they can produce a computerized model of air flow patterns that could help authorities decide where to evacuate people and in which direction after a bioterrorist attack. ``You can use those models to say, `What if something happened here?''' said James Allwine, an engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash....

Gay men should be able to donate blood, students say College group pressures Red Cross By STEVEN BODZIN Los Angeles Times July 11. 2005 8:06AM WASHINGTON - For more than a decade, gay rights advocates have grumbled about a federal policy that forbids blood donation by men who have had sex with men. They say that the policy, originally intended to keep HIV-positive blood from entering the nation's blood supply, implies gay men are inherently sick and that it prevents healthy people from donating. Occasional protests and talks with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees blood banks, have...

WASHINGTON - A scientific article that says terrorists could poison thousands of people through the milk supply — withheld at first at the government's request — is being published despite continuing objections after the National Academy of Sciences concluded it wouldn't help attackers. The study by Lawrence M. Wein and Yifan Liu of Stanford University discusses such questions as how terrorists could release botulinum toxin into the U.S. milk supply and what effective amounts might be. Bruce Alberts, president of the Academy, said in an accompanying editorial that a terrorist would not learn anything useful from the article about the...

WASHINGTON, June 7 (Reuters) - The threat of biochemical attacks by al Qaeda has declined, but the availability of agents and the group's professed interest in using them make the danger very real, a top German counterterrorism official said on Tuesday. "Why are we focusing on biological terrorism? We do so because it fits very well into the strategy, into the thinking of modern terrorists," Georg Witschel, counterterrorism coordinator at Germany's Foreign Ministry, told a biosecurity conference in Washington. "Looking at al Qaeda, since they have lost their territorial base, and since state sponsoring is in general declining, the probability...

WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) -- Terrorists could spread smallpox via infected letters, similar to the 2001 U.S. anthrax attacks, bioweapon experts told United Press International. The experts' comments were spurred by an article in the May issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, which describes twin outbreaks of smallpox in 1901 that were traced to infected letters. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta doubted that smallpox could be spread through infected letters, but several bioweapons experts thought otherwise. D.A. Henderson, of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said it was possible to...

Among the concerns is the possibility terrorists on a suicide mission might deliberately travel to Marburg-infested areas and then travel back to the capital of Luanda on their way to the West. A severe form of hemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola, the Marburg virus spreads on contact with the fluids the body produces in reaction to it, such as blood, urine, excrement, vomit and saliva.

I will try to find the entire speech later, but I wanted to pass this amazing fact just announced on the floor of the Senate by Judd Gregg: In 2001, the U.S. had, on hand, 9,000 smallpox vaccines. Today, after the work of this Congress and administration, the U.S. has 300,000,000. No, that is NO misprint: from 9,000 to 300 Million. And some assert this President hasn't done his job in fighting the War on Terror at home.

THE al-Qaeda terror group made unexpected advances in developing a virulent biological strain - dubbed "Agent X" - before the September 11, 2001, attacks, a US presidential commission on US intelligence operations said today. The commission said in its final report that intelligence analysts were "surprised by the intentions and level of research and development" uncovered after the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. The commission, appointed by US President George W. Bush in response to intelligence failures in Iraq, said US intelligence had long held that al-Qaeda members had trained in crude methods for producing biological agents such...

In the fight against terrorism, few stones are left unturned. Every day, patient data from a handful of emergency rooms is sent to the Indiana State Department of Health to be crunched and analyzed. An epidemiologist watches intently for upward trends in rashes, fevers and unexplained deaths. Or a sudden surge in over-the-counter drug sales. The practice -- called syndromic surveillance -- broke onto the public health scene immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and later anthrax deaths. The surveillance method is widely viewed as a tool to detect a possible bioterrorism attack. Computers allow the instant sharing...

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