Word: anthrax
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...think the U.S. would have a bustling biodefense industry by now. In a State of the Union speech laced with references to terrorism, Bush asked Congress for nearly $6 billion to fund Project BioShield, a program he said would "quickly make available effective vaccines and treatments against agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola and plague." That sounded like a good idea, considering the havoc wrought by the anthrax mailings of 2001, which killed five people and set off a near panic for treatment. So Congress anted up. Eighteen months later, Bush signed BioShield into law. The measure set aside...
...countries, including the U.S., have in their laws a provision that permits their governments to overturn patents in exceptional circumstances. "If Roche plays hardball," says Redpath, "governments could just say, 'we're going to overturn the patent. This is a national emergency.'" Such moves would not be unprecedented. After anthrax mailings following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks stoked biosecurity concerns, the Canadian and the U.S. government told the German drug firm Bayer that if it did not ramp up production and sell its anti-infective Cipro at a reasonable cost, they would do so themselves. Bayer wound up cutting...
...Unlike the anthrax scare, pandemic fears are widespread and taken far more seriously by international agencies. So the demand for a treatment--until, at least, a vaccine becomes available, and probably well after--isn't likely to subside. It will continue to draw manufacturers considerably less concerned than is Roche about its intellectual property rights. Cipla, an Indian generics manufacturer that already sells cheap HIV drugs to African countries, now plans to begin selling a generic version of Tamiflu at cut-rate prices--and says it will do so probably within three months, regardless of whether the Swiss drug firm...
...Harvard. Last summer, I wrote a postcard to The Crimson from Beirut. I was working for a non-profit (without a glossy brochure, to be sure) coordinating an exchange program between Middle Eastern and American college students. The summer before, I conducted experiments on the spore covering of the anthrax bacterium, finding lab work too slow-paced to really capture my interest. This past summer, I was one of those pasty i-bankers emerging squinty-eyed into the sun after a long summer spent staring at CNBC and Excel’s Visual Basic editor. And journalism? Outside...
...response. There is plenty of evidence, for instance, that al-Qaeda cells are interested in getting their hands on a small amount of biological, chemical or radiological weaponry, with the intent of producing a giant death toll from a soft target. Imagine if the London bombs were filled with anthrax or sarin...