Today's Headlines: March 22, 2019
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Biological Agents & Infectious Diseases
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Ebola Total Approaches 1,000 as Cases Reappear in Beni
(CIDRAP)
Continuing a recent surge in new Ebola cases, the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC's) health ministry reported 11 more cases today, including 2 in Beni, an area that had been an epicenter earlier in the outbreak, bringing the outbreak total to 991 cases.
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TB in US at All-Time Low, but Global Decline Small
(CIDRAP)
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new numbers today about tuberculosis (TB) in the United States in advance of World TB Day, which takes place on Mar 24, noting that cases have reached an all-time low.
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Government Affairs & National Security
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Research & Development Coordination Has Improved, but Additional Actions Needed to Track and Evaluate Projects
(GAO)
The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is required to coordinate research and development (R&D) across the department, which helps to prevent duplicative efforts. We found that the department's R&D project information is stored in various disparate sources (e.g., reports, data systems, etc.)—which makes it difficult to identify and track. By developing a method to align these sources, the directorate can better compile and analyze R&D project information.
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New Index Offers Tool to Monitor Global Disease Outlook
(Homeland Security News) A new global index offers an original way to monitor national-level preparedness for infectious disease, providing a holistic view of a country’s capacity to mitigate the spread of illness and pandemics.
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WHO Reveals Delayed Pick for H3N2 Flu Vaccine Strain
(CIDRAP) After waiting an extra month to decide on the H3N2 strain, World Health Organization (WHO) vaccine advisors today finalized their recommendations on strains to include in the Northern Hemisphere 2019-20 flu vaccines.
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Medicine & Public Health
UPS Eyes In-Home Health Services with US Vaccine Project
(Reuters)
The world’s largest package delivery firm is preparing to test a U.S. service that dispatches nurses to vaccinate adults in their homes, Reuters has learned, as the company and its healthcare clients work to fend off cost pressures and competitive threats from Amazon.com.
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A
dversarial Attacks on Medical Machine Learning
(
Science)
With public and academic attention increasingly focused on the new role of machine learning in the health information economy, an unusual and no-longer-esoteric category of vulnerabilities in machine-learning systems could prove important. These vulnerabilities allow a small, carefully designed change in how inputs are presented to a system to completely alter its output, causing it to confidently arrive at manifestly wrong conclusions. These advanced techniques to subvert otherwise-reliable machine-learning systems—so-called adversarial attacks—have, to date, been of interest primarily to computer science researchers.
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Demonstration of End-to-End Automation of DNA Data Storage
(Nature)
Synthetic DNA has emerged as a novel substrate to encode computer data with the potential to be orders of magnitude denser than contemporary cutting edge techniques. However, even with the help of automated synthesis and sequencing devices, many intermediate steps still require expert laboratory technicians to execute. We have developed an automated end-to-end DNA data storage device to explore the challenges of automation within the constraints of this unique application.
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Essential Metabolism for a Minimal Cell
(
Scientific Reports
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JCVI-syn3A, a robust minimal cell with a 543 kbp genome and 493 genes, provides a versatile platform to study the basics of life. Using the vast amount of experimental information available on its precursor,
Mycoplasma mycoides capri, we assembled a near-complete metabolic network with 98% of enzymatic reactions supported by annotation or experiment.
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Published by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
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