Some links worth checking out regarding suppressing publishing and bioterrorism

Just a quick one here with some links worth checking out regarding the recent discussion of suppressing some parts of a paper on engineering flu viruses

• Fearing Bioterrorism, Government Panel Asks: What Research Should Be Secret? | PBS NewsHour | Dec. 22, 2011 | PBS
• Stop the presses! H5N1 Frankenflu is going to kill us all! by Michael Eisen at "It is not junk"
• Strain Game by Carl Zimmer at Slate
• The Trouble with Scientific Secrets by Michael Spector at the New Yorker
• Seeing Terror Risk, US Asks Journals to Cut Flu Study Facts - NY Times
• AM Vitals: Figuring Out How to Handle Access to Bird-Flu Data by  Katherine Hobson

What is in a name? A case study of genomic epidemiology w/ Bacillus cereus and Bacillus anthracis

There is a very interesting new paper that just came online in the Archives of Pathology: Rapidly Progressive, Fatal, Inhalation Anthrax-Like Infection in a Human: Case Report, Pathogen Genome Sequencing, Pathology, and Coordinated Response

I was alerted to the paper by Eileen Choffnes of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine Forum on Microbial Threats (which I am a member of).  In the paper, James Musser, Angela Wright and colleagues, the authors discuss the use of genome sequencing in the characterization of a fatal infection with a bacterium that appeared to be a species of Bacillus.  Their summary is below and pretty much sums it up: