Category: Top Stories

If you can?t wait to communicate good news, you can pick up your smartphone and text or tweet it to the world. But bad news is different.

The recently documented mistakes at federal laboratories involving anthrax, flu and smallpox have incited public outrage at the government?s handling of dangerous pathogens. But the episodes were just a tiny fraction of the hundreds that have occurred in recent years across a sprawling web of academic, commercial and government labs that operate without clear national standards or oversight, federal reports show.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will simulate a terrorist bombing at Camp Randall Stadium early Thursday ? complete with explosive sound effects, billowing smoke and pretend victims ? to test its emergency preparedness plan involving everyone from police and fire squads to hospital emergency departments and the FBI.

ATLANTA ? Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spent much of Wednesday completing a report that would let the public see, in embarrassing detail, how the sloppy handling of anthrax by scientists at its headquarters here had potentially exposed dozens of employees to the deadly bacteria.

At 4PM ET, the German soccer team will face Brazil in The World Cup semi-finals. The Germans might not have made it.  Just a few days ago, the team could have been stopped, not by their opponent France, but by a virus that caused seven of the team?s players to come down with flu-like symptoms.

The UW-Madison Influenza Research Institute says its work is both necessary and safe.

According to articles in the UK press, Yoshi Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has “deliberately created a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system”. Some reports even allege the work recreates the deadly 1918 pandemic flu virus in a form that resists vaccines.

There is no such thing as zero risk when it comes to the study of pathogenic agents such as influenza. But the research, which has been deemed a priority by both the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, is critical to our ability to forecast, combat and potentially prevent the outbreak of deadly pandemic disease.

UW-Madison scientist Yoshihiro Kawaoka says he?s creating potentially deadly flu viruses to help prevent a pandemic, but a campus biosafety panel member says the research could cause more harm than good because the viruses could escape from the lab.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently discovered that at least 75 workers there had been exposed to possible anthrax infection.

For Cathy Middlecamp, placing academic disciplines in the context of sustainability comes naturally.