The author interviews epidemiologists and bioterrorism experts to assess the risks of a new pandemic.

The United States and the rest of the world need to do a lot more to protect people against microbes like the one causing a mysterious and deadly form of pneumonia, as well as more traditional foes like influenza and tuberculosis, according to a panel of experts from the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

The U.S. government is joining forces with a tiny Dutch biotechnology company on Thursday to develop a vaccine against Ebola, the virus that bleeds people to death and which could be a powerful weapon in bioterrorism.

Experts from the UK are helping African countries to develop the world's first early warning system to prevent malaria epidemics.

A group of Boston researchers have taken advantage of the human genome project, which is mapping the exact sequence of base pairs in human DNA, to form a new strategy for finding invading bacteria and viruses.

A bonanza of federal dollars unleashed by autumn's anthrax attacks may help American medical researchers build better defenses against infectious diseases that are emerging naturally throughout the world, leading bioterrorism experts said yesterday.

A NASA-funded study uses temperature and vegetation data from satellites to help track and predict where West Nile Virus is spreading in North America. Scientists and public health officials hope one day to use near real-time maps to focus resources and stave off the disease more efficiently.

Proposals made by the US government in recent years to intensify medical and public health preparedness for bioterrorism have received additional impetus from anthrax attacks following September 11, 2001. The threat has been exaggerated to support military and law enforcement agendas; resources have been diverted from essential public health priorities; ineffective or dangerous measures have been used; and public health programs have been inappropriately commingled with security programs.

The University of Southern California School of Engineering has received $1.5 million research grant from the National Science Foundation to create swarms of microscopic robots to monitor potentially dangerous microorganisms in the ocean. "With increasing urban runoff, sewage spills and blooms of harmful algae off heavily populated coastal areas, it is very important to be able to sense, and then identify, particular ocean microorganisms quickly," said Ari Requicha, a USC professor of computer science and the project's principal investigator. "The quicker we learn that a pathogen is present in the water, the sooner we can warn people and begin action to correct the situation."

The battles between disease-causing pathogens and the body's defenses have evolved into a complex arms race of sorts. To better understand those battles and find new ways of blocking infection, researchers have turned to genomics — the analysis of an organism's thousands of genes and the roles they play.