Courtesy of Pedro Scassa
Valley Fever, a pneumonia-like lung disease that strikes 50,000 people each year, has become an epidemic in southern Arizona, and John Galgiani, director of the University of Arizona's Valley Fever Center for Excellence in Tucson, wants to know why. But the research that might help this microbiologist uncover the state's Valley Fever mystery has been brought to a halt by the very agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, charged with protecting people from disease. The CDC's new regulations for transporting and handling potentially deadly pathogens has so burdened the labs that once supplied Galgiani with strains from sick patients, the labs are destroying the samples rather than sending them to him.1
Nearly two years after Congress tightened the laws for its select agents, scientists and academics have endured unprecedented scrutiny: lab inspections, FBI background checks, inventory requirements, and security equipment installations. At best, that ...
