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On January 12, 2010, Haiti, one of the world's poorest nations, suffered a 7.0 earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people, flattened the government (literally), and destroyed the relief headquarters of the United Nations. Consequently, over a million people were left homeless and live in squalor without access to adequate hygiene, clean water, or food. And earlier this November, Hurricane Tomas only added to the devastation with widespread flooding. This setting was ripe for cholera, a deadly diarrheal disease, to rear its ugly head. And sadly, that's what happened.

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) have evolved in interestingly different ways in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The CWC and its major international organization -- the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons -- have become rather opaque to civil society, despite a significant program of official activities.

I first realized the power of intranasal drug delivery after reading a 2005 paper in Nature entitled "Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans." In it, the authors--several psychologists, neuroscientists, and economists--reported on a study based on a game that pitted two players against each other--an investor and a trustee. (You may be wondering what this has to do with oxytocin, a neuropeptide involved in mammalian social behaviour, but bear with me!) The investor has the option of donating his money to the trustee.

The Graham-Talent WMD Commission asserted again last week that a bioterrorism attack that "will fundamentally change the character of life for the world's democracies" is highly likely to occur within the next four years. The commission argues that the United States must urgently expand its efforts to develop vaccines and other medical countermeasures against potential bioterrorism agents.