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JAKARTA (AFP) — The future of a major US Navy research laboratory in Indonesia is in doubt amid allegations, dismissed as "crazy" by US diplomats, of espionage and secret experiments. Negotiations between Washington and Jakarta over the renewal of the operating contract of US Naval Medical Research Unit-2, or Namru-2, have stalled over a range of issues including diplomatic immunity for its US staff. Established in Indonesia in 1970 and charged with researching infectious diseases of military importance, the facility employs 19 Americans and more than 100 Indonesians and is based in Indonesian health ministry grounds. Its operations have attracted...

Uganda declared an outbreak of Ebola after a case of the relatively rare Sudan strain was confirmed in the country, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday. The WHO’s Africa office said in a statement the case was confirmed after testing a sample from a 24-year-old man in the country’s Mubende district. Ugandan health authorities investigated six suspicious deaths in the district this month. The country’s health ministry said the 24-year-old patient died after displaying symptoms. “There are currently eight suspected cases who are receiving care in a health facility,” WHO Africa said, adding that it is helping Uganda’s...

Walmart has recalled an aromatherapy spray after it identified a bacteria in the product that has now been linked to four illnesses and two deaths... ...The spray, “Better Homes & Gardens Lavender & Chamomile Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones," was found Oct. 6 in the home of a Georgia resident who became ill with melioidosis in late July, according to the CDC..

* The National Institutes of Health has doled out nearly $46 million in taxpayer funds to 100 Chinese institutions in the form of subgrants since fiscal year 2012, federal data shows. * 27 of the Chinese organizations, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, received funds from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIH subagency to perform research on infectious diseases, the data shows. * One of the subgrants from Fauci’s subagency to a Chinese government-owned institution explicitly states that the U.S. will only receive taxpayer-funded research data upon approval by Chinese government authorities. * A bipartisan group of senators wrote a letter to...

New, difficult-to-detect variants of the African swine fever virus circulating in China have spread the disease to pig herds across the country this year, leading to rising incidents of mass infection on farms and stepped-up control measures to stop swine fever’s further spread into livestock supply chains. Since late last year, provinces including Henan, Shandong, Hebei, Jiangsu and Guangdong, as well as the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, have reported new outbreaks. Farms have reported that infected pigs typically show only mild symptoms in the early stages but have a longer incubation period, making it difficult to diagnose the disease before...

“Viruses gonna virus.” It’s a phrase I’ve seen on Twitter and have often repeated myself in one form or another. These days, it’s typically used by we COVID-realists to communicate the reality of the situation we face - that of a highly transmissible but relatively mild (for most) virus that long ago broke any sort of realistic containment. Thus, draconian efforts to do so have resulted, in most cases and probably every case by the time this is over, of the virus defeating man’s efforts and succeeding in doing what it’s extremely good at - virusing! Consequently, by kicking against...

It's time to stop throwing money at an obsolete form of travel and focus on the transportation system that is already moving more than 80 percent of passenger travel in the U.S. When most of the nation’s governors shut down nonessential businesses and directed people to stay at home, they made the mistake of keeping urban transit systems running despite a 2018 study showing that mass public transportation systems expedite the spread of infectious diseases in communities. Further, a 2011 study found that people who ride urban transit are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections...

The government is telling us to wash our hands and use disinfectants on surfaces around us to kill the coronavirus. While that may help somewhat, most people cannot possibly hit every area. That is where disinfection companies are coming in to save the day. They are desperately needed because the coronavirus can survive for hours or days depending on the type of surface. These companies are one of the necessary steps toward the end of the lockdowns in order to prepare businesses for re-opening. But will the biased media spread the message of how important this service is and how...

Infectious Disease Modeling: What’s the Track Record? The London Times has a fascinating story on the tiny, incestuous world of infectious disease modelers. It begins with the two modeling outfits in Great Britain: Oxford University and Imperial College, London. We have all learned about Imperial as the source of the two wildly conflicting estimates that the British government has relied on. Now an Oxford professor is questioning Imperial’s model: The first public signs of academic tensions over Imperial’s domination of the debate came when Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, published a paper suggesting that some of...

Predicting the future is a tough racket. If people were any good at it, we’d all be multiple lottery winners. Since we aren’t, that’s a pretty good indication that we have the ability to guess what will happen, but possess no clairvoyance. That brings us to today, when the country and the world are shut down over what is expected to happen with the coronavirus. Like everything else, the predictions aren’t panning out. Were this just $2 wasted on a lottery ticket it wouldn’t matter. But are we hurting millions of people and spending trillions of dollars on nothing more...

The global coronavirus pandemic has thrown the United States (like most of the rest of the world) into a sort of quasi-organized chaos. All across the country, businesses, health care systems, governments and schools have been disrupted. In my own field of higher education, most colleges and universities have been forced to close live, in-person classes and move entirely to online instruction. As someone who teaches courses in entrepreneurship and innovation, this is a riveting phenomenon to watch, a case study unfolding in real time. Since the early 2000s, I have taught from author Clayton Christensen's seminal 1997 book, "The...

As (mostly) blue-state governors trip all over themselves trying to test the limits of what a real totalitarian police state would look like if their Bolshevik wet dreams ever came true, reasonable Americans wonder if the proscribed “cure” to stopping the Wuhan virus might, in the long run, be infinitely worse than the disease itself. Leftists and even some big-government type conservatives have taken advantage of what they clearly see as a great opportunity to virtue signal on this issue, because nothing says “I’m a good person” better than a condescending tweet or pajama-clad quarantine video. ‘We’re saving lives,’ they...

America has faced great challenges in the past, and we have always gotten through them stronger than we were before. From the Civil War to the Great Depression to World War II, we have been through some horrific stuff. In the Civil War alone, we lost 750,000 people, or 2% of our population at the time. That would be 7 million deaths at our current population level. In World War II, we suffered another 405,000 deaths. Since World War II, we have faced many challenges, including wars and terrible tragedies like 9/11, but as far as the scale goes, we...

"It's a war," says President Donald Trump of his efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, and likening his role to that of "wartime president." New York Governor Andrew Cuomo welcomed the president's claim to his commander in chief role in the crisis and his resolve: "The president and I agreed yesterday... we're fighting the same war -- and this is a war." Some measures already taken do call to mind actions in wartime. Commercial airline flights have been reduced or canceled. Schools have been closed. Universities have shut their doors. Where Ford, Chrysler, GM and other great auto companies shifted...

Editor's note: Timothy Craig Allen co-authored this column.Everyone desperately hopes that the coronavirus will recede as spring arrives. Of the seven pre-existing coronaviruses that afflict humans, at least four are seasonal. This is also true of most strands of the common flu, as the low humidity in the winter helps viruses to thrive. How COVID-19 will respond isn’t known yet. It was only discovered in late December, but there is already some statistical evidence indicating that warm weather will inhibit its spread. There is also evidence that countries with travel restrictions have experienced lower death rates. Usually, the weather starts...

We are facing one discrete problem in the mass of chaos surrounding this pandemic that we can and must address immediately -- the security of November's election. Voting in the traditional way requires us to do the very thing that epidemiologists and public health authorities have forbidden us to do -- gather in large groups for prolonged periods. That's inevitable when you must wait in long lines to vote. In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine decided to postpone his state's primary election citing the health emergency despite a judge ruling that he lacked the authority to do it. The State Supreme...

Silver linings accompany most catastrophic events, and one major one with the coronavirus is the remarkable way Americans (and people throughout the world) have come together to fight this outbreak. Though the stock market has reflected a nation in panic, in other respects Americans, for the most part, have reacted responsibly, unselfishly and cooperatively, and I pray we are making substantial progress toward flattening the growth curve of this virus. President Donald Trump and his extraordinary team of generals leading this war effort are implementing a multipronged approach to combat the spread of the disease, treat those infected with...

Until the coronavirus outbreak, most conservatives were pretty confident President Donald Trump would get reelected. The economy was doing great, which is a good sign an incumbent president will win reelection. But the coronavirus may change things. We may end up in a recession. Although only 58 people in the U.S. have died from it so far, the country is taking drastic action to reduce the spread of it. The flu kills about 12,000 people in the U.S. each year, but the coronavirus is 10 times more deadly than the flu. As a result, the extreme measures are hurting the...

It gets very hard to ask questions when nearly all of the media and government and many of those you live near and work with are all wringing their hands in unison. COVID-19 or coronavirus has many scared and scrambling. But who’s asking questions beyond, “What do we do now!?” The psychology around this virus and the way it's being covered is very strange. We know President Trump began taking action in January to mitigate travel between China and the United States. Media and health officials knew about coronavirus then. Maybe you heard a passing blip about a cruise ship, but...

“And these are the religious people?!” The state Capitol turned into a chaotic scene Thursday as both houses of legislature — and eventually Gov. Cuomo — passed a bill that will end New York’s policy of allowing religious exemptions from vaccine requirements. Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, the bill’s sponsor, got cursed out and flat-out threatened at one point by opponents of the legislation after it got passed and sent to the Senate floor. “We’ll be back for you Jeffrey!” shouted one man in Orthodox religious garb, who was fuming in the gallery with others, many of whom had children with them....