Word: bios
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Most people searching on Barack Obama want to read his bio; many other queries focus on his religious beliefs, likely spurred by the allegation that he attended a radical Islamic madrassa during his childhood, which was later revealed to be false. A deeper look at the search-term data unearthed a wide interest in the American flag pin that disappeared from Obama's lapel last month...
...flavor in France; the Chinese associate cucumbers with regularity, so in China it's cucumber-flavored. But Danone also insists its health claims are based on hard science. The company has founded 16 "Danone Institutes" to study nutrition. It filed 30 health-related patents last year and maintains a "bio bank" with 3,000 strains of bacteria for research...
Worse, there is no centralized regulatory body that oversees bio-labs or their work - 17 federal agencies are involved in biological research in some way, but no single agency is tasked with tracking and managing the risks. "Several agencies have a need to know the number and the location of these labs to support their missions," says Rhodes, but no agency actually has this information. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has primary responsibility for monitoring the use of select agents - but according to critics, it's working with an outdated list. The last revision to the list...
Lack of oversight means lack of policing, which often leads to underreporting of potentially fatal accidents. Labs are required by law to report mishaps with select agents immediately to the CDC, but that doesn't always happen. Case in point: Last year, a bio-lab worker at Texas A&M University became infected with the deadly brucellosis virus. The university did not report the case and may never have admitted it if an industry gadfly, Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, had not persuaded a local district attorney to strong-arm the university into giving up its internal records...
...anthrax and plague instead of, say, drug-resistant tuberculosis or the hepatitis viruses - which may be doing the country a disservice. In a 2005 open letter, organized by Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemistry professor, 758 American microbiologists complained that NIH priorities favoring research of "high bio-defense significance but low public-heath significance" were misguided and jeopardized public health progress...