Anthrax is an acute infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. Anthrax most commonly occurs in wild and domestic lower vertebrates (cattle, sheep, goats, camels, antelopes, and other herbivores), but it can also occur in humans when they are exposed to infected animals or tissue from infected animals.
Anthrax is most common in agricultural regions where it occurs in animals. These include South and Central America, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. When anthrax affects humans, it is usually due to an occupational exposure to infected animals or their products. Workers who are exposed to dead animals and animal products from other countries where anthrax is more common may become infected with B. anthracis (industrial anthrax). Anthrax outbreaks occur in the United States on an annual basis in livestock and wild game animals such as deer.
Anthrax infection can occur in three forms: cutaneous (skin), inhalation, and gastrointestinal. B. anthracis spores can live in the soil for many years, and humans can become infected with anthrax by handling products from infected animals or by inhaling anthrax spores from contaminated animal products. Anthrax can also be spread by eating undercooked meat from infected animals. It is rare to find infected animals in the United States.
Federal, state, and local agencies have reached consensus on the first validated national standard for collecting, packaging, and transporting samples of visible powders that are suspected of being biological threat agents, such as anthrax.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced it will purchase 10,000 therapeutic courses of treatment of Anthrax Immune Globulin (AIG) from Cangene Corporation of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for a total of $143,833,719.
A new program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) aims to better understand the complex biochemical networks that regulate the interactions between infectious organisms and the human or animal cells they infect.
The cellular process of transcription, in which the enzyme RNA polymerase constructs chains of RNA from information contained in DNA, depends upon previously underappreciated sections of both the DNA promoter region and RNA polymerase
Anthrax vaccine administered in combination with a short course of antibiotics completely protected nonhuman primates from inhalational anthrax, the most lethal form of the disease, according to scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
Development of a fundamentally new "candidate," or potential, vaccine for visceral leishmaniasis (LEASH-ma-NIGH-a-sis), a parasitic disease that kills about 60,000 people annually, is reported in the current issue of ACS Chemical Biology. Spread by the bite of infected female sand flies, visceral leishmaniasis infects about 500,000 people annually, with the majority of cases occurring in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan and Brazil.
Not all biological weapons are created equal. They are separated into categories A through C, category A biological agents being the scariest: They are easy to spread, kill effectively and call for special actions by the pubic health system. One of these worrisome organisms is anthrax, which has already received its fair share of media attention. But work in Vince Fischetti's laboratory at Rockefeller University suggests that a newly discovered protein could be used to fight anthrax infections and even decontaminate areas in which anthrax spores have been released.
Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Toronto have designed a nanoscale assembly of molecules that successfully counteracts and inhibits anthrax toxin in animal and laboratory experiments.
Every time the human body encounters a virus, bacteria or other infectious agent, immune cells called B-lymphocytes multiply in lymph nodes and then swing into action to fight off the intruders.
A study in Cell reports the discovery of a gene that drives anthrax bacteria's toxic effects. The gene could offer a potential new target for countermeasures against the lethal toxin, according to the researchers.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new, high-throughput technique for identifying the many species of microorganisms living in an unknown "microbial community."
When spores sent through the mail in 2001 caused 11 people to contract anthrax - ultimately killing five of them - infectious disease specialists noted that the death rate was substantially lower than the historical mortality rate, which approached 100 percent.
New York city officials say a man has been hospitalized with an infection from anthrax.
A handheld sensor that can quickly spot contamination by deadly strains of the Escherichia coli bug could help prevent infected food reaching consumers.
A new anthrax antibody engineered by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin protects and defends against inhalation anthrax without the use of antibiotics and other more expensive antibodies.
Researchers at Stockholm University have found a substance that quickly knocks out the anthrax bacterium. The bacterium has been used in terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Japan, for example.
By using pathogenic fungi as model systems for understanding fungal diseases, two groups of researchers are reporting new work that offers insight into how carbon dioxide (CO2) governs the morphogenic changes that allow pathogenic fungi to survive in different environments and invade the human body
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin discovered why lung, but not skin, anthrax infections are lethal. As reported in the newest issue of PloS Pathogen (November 2005) Neutrophils, a form of white blood cells, play a key role in anthrax infections.
A video game that simulates biological, chemical, radiological and natural disasters in a major metropolitan area, developed by a team from the University of Illinois at Chicago, will be used to prepare public health workers and emergency responders for real life emergencies.
A research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories has discovered that common anthrax sampling methods need improvement. The research shows that more deadly spores remain after decontamination than previously believed.
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