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The power of a laboratory in a handheld device - that is what the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) will add to its arsenal in two years. The state-of-the-art chip will help SAF troops detect deadly biological agents like anthrax and swiftly diagnose conditions like malaria while in the thick of action. Said Professor Thomas Gong, director of Attogenix Biosystems: "Using this biological lab-in-a-chip or biochip, a soldier will be able to test if his fever is due to the common cold or Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome)." The device can also test whether water from a stream is safe to...

WASHINGTON, June 12 (UPI) -- The recent outbreak of monkeypox in the United States and the delay in alerting healthcare personnel to its spread highlights the need for a national communications system to alert physicians and public health officials rapidly about bioterrorist attacks or emerging diseases such as SARS and West Nile virus. Over the past several weeks, dozens of Americans might have been infected with monkeypox –- a close but less-deadly cousin of smallpox -- in its first outbreak in the Western Hemisphere. Doctors in Wisconsin saw the first patient May 22 when a 4-year-old girl developed a rash...

The subject of the anthrax mailings of September and October 2001 has become the focus of considerable online "cult" activity. Using a search engine, you will find people who blame the CIA, people who insist it was all a devious Israeli plot, and folks who blame a sinister Wall Street cabal--the attacks, as I recall, were triggered by a decline in the Dow Jones average. There are those who claim some sort of right-wing "bio-evangelist" was responsible, and others who point the finger at those "Greenpeace ecology nuts", or at Iraqi secret agents operating out of the UN. One researcher...

The Russians worked with monkeypox virus, a close cousin to smallpox, in their bioweapons program and it is possible terrorists could use it in a biological attack against the United States, scientists and former United Nations weapons inspectors told United Press International. Although some biological weapons experts are concerned with the possibility of terrorists using another smallpox-related virus called camelpox, which Iraq has admitted to researching, Mark Buller, a biologist at Saint Louis University who conducts research on smallpox vaccines, said he is more concerned about monkeypox. Buller's concern stems from the fact that monkeypox, unlike camelpox, causes mortality in...

<p>Continuing bioterrorism scares are breathing new life into obscure scientific projects as the nation gropes for a way to defend itself from deadly microbes.</p> <p>The sudden interest in microbiology is fueled by revelations such as the discovery of a mobile bioterrorism laboratory that traveled Iraqi highways.</p>

<p>Doctors, scientists and public health officials across the nation went into overdrive within hours of the World Health Organization's first global alert on SARS, the deadly new virus from Asia. The word went out over phone trees, blast faxes, BlackBerry alerts, e-mail. And inside 24 hours, the U.S. public health system stood ready to tackle SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — as it became the world's latest "emerging disease."</p>

WASHINGTON -- The FBI has developed a new theory on a central mystery of the 2001 anthrax attacks after finding evidence in a Frederick, Md., pond that may suggest how an ingenious criminal could have packed deadly anthrax spores into envelopes without killing or sickening himself, sources close to the investigation said.

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - A crew member of an Egyptian merchant ship has died in northern Brazil, almost certainly from anthrax, after opening a suitcase suspected of containing the substance which he was taking to Canada. A spokesman for Brazilian federal police in the Amazon state of Para said on Monday an autopsy of the Egyptian man, whom he named as Ibrahim Saved Soliman Ibrahim, showed that he had died after vomiting, internal bleeding and multiple organ failure. "He was the victim of anthrax," said Castro, adding that police were 90 percent certain that Ibrahim had died of anthrax. Ibrahim...

A bio-terrorist attack might not be evident until a significant number of patients start displaying unusual symptoms, a leading health professional has warned. Healthcare systems would also struggle to cope with the extra thousands of patients needing advanced life support in the event of a major attack. The comments came from Dr Vivienne Nathanson, of the British Medical Association, who was attending a bio-terrorism conference in London. Danger There are no known vaccines or antibiotics that could deal with most potential biological weapons, said Dr Nathanson, the BMA's director of professional activities. "One of the dangers which we have to...

We have just found a coronavirus in intestinal contents of a chicken by a PCR targeted to the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene (pol gene). Sequence analysis of this gene showed that, though it is grouped closely with bovine coronavirus and is distantly related to infectious bronchitis virus, it has low nucleotide identity to all known coronaviruses. The birds were 15 days old and had no clinical sign of any disease. These findings are quite similar to those associated with the coronavirus implicated in SARS.We are now trying to sequence other isolates.

With the reported finding of the anthrax on Iraqi soldiers with instructions on infecting our troops, the cork was just pulled from the bottle IMHO. The justness and correctness of our cause has just been punctuated in such a way as to leave no doubt. Yopu are either with us, or you are with the terrorists and those who fight with them. LET'S ROLL!

Iraq's Government yesterday gave UNMOVIC photographs and videos showing the mobile laboratories that are in use in Iraq. Der Spiegel (link has translation) and the UN News Centre both have reports. You know, the weapons the anti-liberation crowd and Scott Ritter keep saying don't exist. It's too little, too late. "Cheat and Retreat" is about to change to "Retreat and Surrender," and this revelation is exactly why that's necessary. All it does is confirm the utter lunacy of relying on U.N. inspectors to address the threat of Saddam and his weapons in any meaningful way. As a related aside, todays...

An anthrax weapon aimed at a major city could kill at least 123,000 people even if every victim received treatment, experts have calculated. US researchers have used a computer model to predict the devastation that would result from the launch of an anthrax bomb or missile on a city the size of New York. The figures are based on what would happen if a bomb containing 1 kilogram of anthrax spores was dropped on a city of 10 million inhabitants. The projected number of fatalities is based on the assumption that antibiotics would not be administered for 48 hours until...

Ninth person dies of mystery disease as WHO warns world heath threat spread by air travel By MARGIE MASON HANOI, Vietnam (AP): A ninth person has died of a mystery form of pneumonia that the World Health Organization says cannot be stopped by standard drugs and is being spread across the globe by international air travelers. In a rare emergency warning, Geneva-based WHO described the fast-acting, highly contagious disease as "a worldwide health threat.'' It first struck China's southern Guangdong province in January when five people died. In recent days about 150 infections had been reported in Asia, Europe and...

15 March 2003 | GENEVA -- During the past week, WHO has received reports of more than 150 new suspected cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia for which cause has not yet been determined. Reports to date have been received from Canada, China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Early today, an ill passenger and companions who travelled from New York, United States, and who landed in Frankfurt, Germany were removed from their flight and taken to hospital isolation. Due to the spread of SARS to several countries...

WASHINGTON -- Two women developed infections after touching soldiers who had been vaccinated against smallpox and then touching their eyes. Both illnesses were preventable. Health authorities are reminding people who get the shot to keep the spot where they were inoculated covered and to avoid touching the skin and the bandages that cover it. The woman was hospitalized and treated with vaccine immune globulin, which can counteract the most serious reactions to the vaccine.

Deaths of five children in four days spark investigation By STEVE STONE, The Virginian-Pilot © February 21, 2003 State and local health officials are investigating the sudden deaths of five children since Sunday, four of them in Hampton Roads. ``It's a very unusual occurrence to have five young children, who to our knowledge are healthy, have sudden deaths in this short time,'' said Dr. Robert B. Stroube, the state health commissioner. Stroube urged parents not to panic. ``It may just be a purely chance event, and these cases may have absolutely nothing in common,'' Stroube said. Still, anyone with an...

ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2003, AROUND 5:30 P.M., a single-engine Cessna 172 passes over the Santa Monica Mountains, just west of the 405 freeway, heading southeast at 3,500 feet. Over the next 10 minutes it will fly over Brentwood, LAX, Hawthorne, Torrance and Long Beach. Because it will stay carefully in the prescribed north-south transit corridor through the Los Angeles Special Flight Rules Area and squawk code 1201 on the transponder; air traffic control will pay no attention to the plane, and the pilot won't be required to file a flight plan or identify himself in any way.Although the pilot...

WASHINGTON -- U.S. procedures for testing drugs are delaying approval of vital treatments for the victims of biological weapons attacks, a top biowar expert told United Press International. Dr. Ken Alibek, chief of a major biological research program at George Mason University in Virginia, told UPI that some existing drugs might be crucial to saving the lives of victims of anthrax and smallpox attacks. But he said that procedures of the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration are delaying their use for as many as five or six years. Alibek has hands-on experience in biological warfare,...

To secure early warning of a bioterror attack, the government is building a computerized network that will collect and analyze health data of people in eight major cities, administration officials say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to lead the multimillion-dollar surveillance effort, which officials expect to become the cornerstone of a national network to spot disease outbreaks by tracking data like doctor reports, emergency room visits and sales of flu medicine. "Our goal is to have a model that any city could pick up and apply," a senior administration official said of the plan. Officials would not...