President George W. Bush asked members of Congress on Tuesday for $6 billion to support Project Bioshield, a focused program to develop new treatments and vaccines against bioterrorism weapons such as anthrax, smallpox and Ebola. “We must assume that our enemies would use these diseases as weapons, and we must act before the dangers are upon us,” Bush said in his State of the Union address. The new program aims to speed research at the National Institutes of Health to find ways to treat victims of bioterror weapons. For many such weapons, no clear treatment regime yet exists — in part because the threat was not generally considered to be serious until fairly recently. Full Story