The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) launched a new feature to its free smartphone app that will enable users to receive push notifications to their devices to remind them to take important steps to prepare their homes and families for disasters. The reminder feature allows users to receive pre-scheduled safety and preparedness tips.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the availability of an investigational test to screen blood donations for Zika virus. The screening test may be used under an investigational new drug application for screening donated blood in areas with active mosquito-borne transmission of Zika virus.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) teamed with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation to host a symposium where representatives of the fire service and fire research communities identified and prioritized firefighter health and safety issues, and then created a guide for addressing them through scientific study and technology development.
The Non-Traditional Agent Defense Test System is a collection of specialized chambers designed to test chemical agent protection, detection, and decontamination equipment under operational conditions most relevant to today's warfighter. This laboratory is the only facility in the world that allows an entire system to be fully immersed in chemical agent while testing.
Because mosquitoes are so efficient at spreading disease, Robert Meagher, a chemical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, has developed a simple technique for simultaneously detecting RNA from West Nile and chikungunya virus in samples from mosquitoes. He is now working to add the ability to screen for Zika virus.
The antimicrobial arsenal that we count on to save millions of lives each year is alarmingly thin-and these microbes are rapidly evolving resistance to our weapons. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) show that automated techniques commonly used to screen new drugs for mammalian cell toxicity could also dramatically speed up the challenging task of antimicrobial discovery.
Compounds that stop a cellular rescue operation for stuck ribosomes may bolster the nation's defenses against biowarfare and bioterrorism, as well as create alternative antibiotics to handle increasingly resistant pathogens, according to a team of researchers from Penn State.
In response to a request from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization for the Trioplex Real-time RT-PCR Assay, a diagnostic tool for Zika virus that will be distributed to qualified laboratories.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Anthim (obiltoxaximab) injection to treat inhalational anthrax in combination with appropriate antibacterial drugs. Inhalational anthrax is a rare disease that can occur after exposure to infected animals or contaminated animal products, or as a result of an intentional release of anthrax spores.
A national network of public health laboratories prevents an estimated 270,000 cases of food poisoning and saves half a billion dollars every year, according to a study released today. PulseNet is a national laboratory network that connects cases of foodborne illness by comparing DNA fingerprints of the foodborne bacteria and matching illnesses across the country that may be from the same source.
