Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved the 21st Century Cures Act, which seeks to advance the discovery, development, and delivery of cures and includes language seeking to boost the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget. The committee also sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting further review of safety concerns at certain federal labs. It emphasized that a Food and Drug Administration lab in which smallpox was discovered on the National Institutes of Health campus last year had been inspected several times in the previous three years, and questioned why the potentially dangerous pathogen was not unearthed during those inspections.
