The Centers for Disease Control announced this week that 56,300 people in the U.S. have AIDS, a significantly higher figure than the 40,000 people previously estimated. The Wall Street Journal's Marilyn Chase flags that the racial disparity in who gets AIDS is more stark ...

The Washington Post's Annys Shin reports that the Food and Drug Administration found a jalapeno pepper in McAllen, Texas that has bacteria which can cause salmonella. The contaminated pepper was made in Mexico and sold by the small Texas company, Agricola Zaragosa. In May, the FDA warned that ...

I got an e-mail from a friend about a problem in Atlanta -- seems the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost power and their backup generator didn't work.  It happened to be at a lab where the CDC stores and studies highly dangerous viruses such as the H5N1 flu ...

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin reports that a former top Environmental Protection Agency official said Vice-President Cheney's office manipulated Congressional testimony. The White House did so to play down the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming. The Vice-President's office, and the Council of Environmental Quality, allegedly took out ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are off tomatoes and onto jalapeno peppers as the possible source of a recent salmonella outbreak traced to Mexican restaurants, as Jane Zhang and Janet Adamy write in the Wall Street Journal.  Every day that they can't find the answer is a day for critics of government to rehearse their usual refrains.  The easiest thing is to charge incompetence:  Why can't those government people find the problem?  What is wrong with these people?  Business are losing money -- everyone pities the tomato growers who have, it turns out, been "unfairly charged" and have lost "hundreds of millions of dollars."  But consider the alternative -- what if the CDC was doing nothing?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Alison Young reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have started a process to fire agency toxicologist Christopher De Rosa. Dr. De Rosa has recently tried to publicize environmental dangers in the Great Lakes region.

And DeRosa says ...

Morale at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is up for the first time in many years, according to a new agency-wide survey reported on by Alison Young of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Five years ago, the agency launched a reorganization to improve the agency's work with the public, coordination of public health projects with individual states, and what CDC director Julie Gerberding called "the first agency-wide research agenda in the history of CDC."

The Washington Independent’s Arthur Allen reports that it can.  Allen interviewed more than a dozen scientists and employees at the CDC who say a constant turnover in personnel coupled with interference  by CDC director Julie Gerberding in science-based decisions has undermined their work.  Eight of ten top CDC ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were ready to investigate possible health threats from formaldehyde in FEMA trailers given to Hurricane Katrina victims more than a year ago, according to a report by Alison Young in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  But they did not launch an investigation because, according to ...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have completed a study confirming that temporary trailers provided for Gulf Coast residents stranded after Hurricane Katrina are a significant health hazard.  Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post notes that the conclusions come 23 months after FEMA first heard reports of "formaldehyde levels ...