The risks to world health from research to make an extraordinarily lethal avian flu virus contagious in humans have finally caught everyone's attention after months of warnings from us (Lynn Klotz*) and many other experts.

The Atlantic online (Feb. 16) features this question: Shouldn't regular citizens be able...

Experiments to make some of the world's deadliest viruses more contagious to humans or to learn the secrets of those that already are contagious surge to the top of the news and slip downward with regularity. Now they are up again. This time it is work with the H5N1 avian...

Hundreds of people in Vietnam, Hong Kong and mainland China, many of them hospital workers, have come down with a mysterious respiratory illness that has killed at least six people and left most of the others with severe breathing difficulties..., officials of the World Health Organization said yesterday.

Yesterday was...

Humans have been ravaged throughout history by pandemics ranging from bubonic plague, which wiped out a third of Europe in the 1300s, to super-lethal flu such as that caused by the 1918 virus that killed 20 million to 40 million people worldwide in less than two years.

Then they became...

The heavily populated Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, South End and South Boston may soon share their home territory with some of the world's deadliest pathogens - the latter in a controlled environment, of course - for reasons that made little sense seven years ago when proposed and make utterly no...

It would be hard to name a presidential administration whose opening year was marked by as many urgent priorities on as many fronts as Barack Obama's, from the economy to war, from health care to terrorism, global warming to nuclear policy.

Each urgency has unloaded mountains of data demanding new...

The warning could hardly have been more frightening, the source seemingly more credible. Eight years after the horror of 9-11 and the ensuing lethal anthrax-letter mailings, the nation remains so vulnerable to bioterrorists that an attack on a major city by one single crop-duster spraying two to four pounds of...