You may remember the anthrax attacks in the United States that caused panic in 2001. In recent years, a new form of anthrax infection has been discovered that is more difficult to diagnose and more difficult to treat. But public health officials had a difficult time tracing the source of injectional anthrax outbreaks … Until now.
Led by Dr. Paul Keim at NAU, a team of international scientists shed new light on an old question about injectional anthrax by demonstrating the latest advances in whole-genome sequencing. The researchers reconstructed a decades-old outbreak of injectional anthrax by DNA analysis of the anthrax conveyed to victims from injecting heroin. The results were published in EBioMedicine.
