$11.4M awarded for faster flu detection – CDC
December 5, 2006 by Grace Ibay
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention awarded contracts worth $11.4 million to four biotech companies to develop tests that detect influenza more rapidly.
Currently, tests take anywhere from 24 hours to a week to process a test in the US (counting delivery of samples to lab). The CDC wants a “good way to quickly and easily distinguish at a patient’s bedside whether they suffer from H5N1 or a more common type of influenza,” said Director Julie Gerberding said in a prepared statement.
Cepheid (California) received $2.4 million; IQuum Inc. (Massachusetts) got $3.8 million; Meso Scale Diagnostics (Maryland) was awarded $706,241; and Nanogen (. San Diego, CA) received $4.5 million.
[Source: International Herald Tribune]
Tags: CDC, detection method, influenza, H5N1, seasonal flu, bird flu, Cepheid
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] Are things getting better, or worse? The world has seen more outbreaks this month that in the last few months. A prediction of 62 million humans are going to die of flu pandemic if we’re not in the careful. South Korea had three outbreaks one after another. Later, another Korean and Vietnamses outbreaks made things worse. Jordan was also hit bad this month. France also slaughtered a lot of infected chickens. This caused concern whether the current bird flu outbreaks have really been put to control. The CDC was lambasted for not having a centralized plan for the pandemic. Now, the CDC will award a large sum of money for those who can lead to a cure for the colds. The agency actually will work with bloggers, if the parents don’t mind. More international agencies are also joining forces to combat the bird flu. [...]