|
|
Archived News Week ending February 21st, 2005
|
|
BBC World: Bird flu 'has pandemic potential'
|
The bird flu virus could mutate to pass from human to human and trigger a pandemic, latest evidence suggests, according to scientists.
Outbreaks so far have been through the flu spreading from animals to humans.
But Nancy Cox, of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, says a number of subtypes have proven their ability to jump the species barrier.
The H5N1 strain, which has killed 42 people in Asia since 1997, was one of many possible candidates, she said.
Strains had emerged in the last year that were more lethal to animals than the 1997 strain, she said.
The recent spurt of human infections increases the likelihood that a mutant strain would arise that could spread between humans, she added.
We could have a relatively severe pandemic as occurred in 1918 or perhaps even worse.
"It's impossible to predict what the consequences would be. We might have a relatively mild pandemic like we did in 1968," Dr Cox told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"Alternatively, we could have a relatively severe pandemic as occurred in 1918 or perhaps even worse."
The virus could mutate by shuffling genetic material with the human flu virus, Dr Cox added.
This would make it better at specifically targeting human airways for attack...
|
|
BBC: Plague Outbreak
|
At least 60 people are thought to have died in an outbreak of plague in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the World Health Organization has said.
It is thought to be the worst outbreak of pneumonic plague, which affects victims' lungs, for 50 years.
The people who have died are all diamond miners. Another 350 miners have been infected.
The WHO is to send an emergency team to the area, in the former Zaire, in a bid to stem the outbreak.
An advance team has already visited the area to confirm that people are infected with the plague.
The WHO said the mine was near Zobin, in Oriental province, north of the country's biggest city, Kisangani, a major trading centre on the Congo River.
The outbreak began in late December, but the WHO were only alerted to it last week.
Around 7,000 people worked at the mine. The WHO team will focus on trying to trace the 2,000 who have left since the start of the outbreak.
Bubonic plague is endemic in parts of Africa, including the DRC, but pneumonic plague, which occurs when the bacteria infects the lung, has a very high fatality rate and is "invariably" deadly when left untreated, the WHO said.
Humans are generally infected with plague by rodents and fleas, but the pneumonic form of the disease can also be transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets...
|
|
CBS News: Rare Drug-Resistant HIV Hits NYC
|
City health officials are working to track down sex partners of a man diagnosed with a rare strain of highly drug-resistant HIV that progressed rapidly to AIDS.
The virus was found in a man in his mid-40s who had unprotected sex with other men, often while using crystal methamphetamine, an addictive stimulant, health officials said Friday. j
"We are not aware of another case like this in the United States, or elsewhere," said Dr. Ron Valdiserri, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention.
Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden said the rare HIV strain is "difficult or impossible to treat."
The New York Times, citing a person familiar with the case whom it did not identify, reported Saturday that the man was believed to have had unprotected sex with hundreds of people.
The man - who had not previously undergone antiviral drug treatment - was diagnosed with the rare strain in December 2004. He apparently had been infected recently..
|
|
Drudge Report: Search for Source of SuperHIV Virus Source Widens...
|
AIDS viruses isolated from two people are being studied to determine whether either might be the source of a rare and potentially more aggressive form of H.I.V. detected in a New York City man, an AIDS scientist involved in the studies said yesterday.
Many more tests need to be conducted to determine if the strains from the three people are the same, said the scientist, Dr. David Ho. He directs the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan, which is conducting some of the studies in collaboration with the New York City health department. While some findings may be available in a week, others will take longer, Dr. Ho said in an interview.
Even if the strains prove to be the same, that would not necessarily mean that a supervirus is on the loose, since there could be genetic factors in the first man that would make his infection progress faster.
"What we can't prove is that this is a supervirus" and that it caused the rapid progression from infection to AIDS in the New York City man, Dr. Ho said.
Laboratory tests in Dr. Ho's laboratory and elsewhere have shown that the strain from the man whose case started the investigation is resistant to 19 of the 20 licensed anti-retroviral drugs. AIDS experts said that the strain might have led to the rapid onset of AIDS in the man or that his immune defenses might have been weakened by drug use or genetics.
Molecular tests of the man's H.I.V. show it has changes that appear to differ significantly from the typical strains being circulated in New York City, and precisely what those changes mean remains to be determined, Dr. Ho said.
|
|
BBC Science: Ancient human remains suggest TB killed off leprosy
|
Human remains dating from the 1st Century AD suggest tuberculosis (TB) may have killed off leprosy in Europe.
Scientists at University College London have been examining a shrouded body recently discovered in a sealed chamber in Israel.
The bones reveal the man was infected with both TB and leprosy.
Given that TB is the more aggressive and faster-killing of the two, the scientists say it would have won the battle of the diseases.
We believe if a person had both leprosy and TB they did not have time to die from the leprosy and died of TB instead.
In the Middle Ages, leprosy was widespread.
Around this time, TB began to spread across Europe and overtook leprosy, which has become a relatively rare disease now in comparison to TB.
There is a theory that having one of these diseases protects a person against contracting the other one, which is called cross immunity.
Some say this theory explains the rise of TB and fall of leprosy - more people caught TB and were therefore protected against leprosy...
|
|
Polio Making Comeback?
|
Polio apparently reached Mecca, Islam's holy city, just before the annual pilgrimage last month by two million Muslims, and World Health Organization officials now fear that it could be spreading around the world, carried by returning pilgrims.
In crowded nations with spotty vaccination coverage like Bangladesh and Indonesia, "there could be substantial consequences," Dr. Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the World Health Organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Geneva, said in an interview.
"This is a crucial point," he said. "We're staring at the whites of the eyes of this thing."
A Saudi government spokesman said his country had feared the arrival of polio this year because it was known to be spreading across Africa from northern Nigeria and started a sweeping polio inoculation campaign in September, hoping to head off the threat before the height of the hajj, or pilgrimage, in late January.
Saudi Arabia had been polio-free since 1995, but two cases were found there late last year. The first, confirmed in late December, was in the port city of Jidda in a girl who became paralyzed on Nov. 6, just after arriving from Sudan. The second, more worrisome case, became known just Wednesday, Dr. Aylward said. It was discovered in a 5-year-old Nigerian boy who developed paralysis on Dec. 15.
What made it more troubling was that his family lived for several years in an illegal encampment on the outskirts, so he must have caught it in Saudi Arabia.
Spotting new outbreaks in far-flung countries will still take weeks. Paralysis affects only about one in 200 carriers of the virus, symptoms can take up to 35 days to emerge as pilgrims can take many weeks to get home by bus or boat. Also, epidemiological reporting in poor countries is often slipshod...
|
|
WashingtonPost: Technical hurdles Separate Terrorist From Biowarfare
|
Hoping to hasten the doomsday their leader foretold, scientists who were members of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult brewed batches of anthrax in the early 1990s and released it from an office building and out the back of trucks upwind of the Imperial Palace.
But the wet mixture kept clogging the sprayers the Aum Shinrikyo scientists had rigged up, and, unbeknown to them, the strains of anthrax they had ordered from a commercial firm posed no danger to anyone. Frustrated by their failure at biowarfare, they turned to a less arduous method of mass killing -- chemical attack -- and in 1995 killed 12 Tokyo subway riders by releasing sarin gas in the tunnels.
The cult's experiences demonstrate just a few of the myriad technical obstacles that terrorists who might try to manufacture biological weapons could face, problems that would confound even skilled scientists who tried to help them, biological warfare experts say.
Locating virulent anthrax specimens with which to brew an attack-size batch would be difficult given the medical community's caution about suspicious buyers. Smallpox could be next to impossible to obtain because it is thought to exist in only two secure sites, in Russia and in the United States.
Creating aerosolized microbes also requires expertise in many arcane scientific disciplines, such as culturing and propagating germs that retain their virulence and "weaponizing" them so they float like a gas and enter the lungs easily.
But specialists also say it is all but inevitable that al Qaeda or another terrorist group will gain the expertise to launch small-scale biological attacks...
|
|
NYTimes: City Weighs Plan to Deliver Medicines To Public After Attack
|
A t the end of the first stage of a federal pilot program to determine how major cities could deliver medicine to thousands of people within 48 hours of a terrorist attack, New York is grappling with several proposals to achieve that goal.
One plan being considered by federal and city officials involves using postal workers to distribute medicines. Another would ask the city's home-care health aides to volunteer to give out the needed drugs. Some city emergency planners have suggested using drive-through windows at restaurants and banks as points of distribution.
Each idea has its drawbacks, emergency planners say.
Beyond concerns about potential civil unrest and communication constraints, city health officials question the reliability of any delivery force, especially one that is made up of volunteers or people with no medical training. Health experts and emergency planners wonder whether some of the city's emergency medical supplies could be used quickly enough since some of them are stored outside the state because of jurisdictional disputes among city agencies.
"New York City has learned a lot since 9/11, and in many ways it's way ahead of the curve in terms of readiness," said Dr. Shelley A. Hearne, the executive director of the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit group based in Washington. "But the planning for actually delivering medicines and food to individuals is at a surprisingly rudimentary level."
In addition to the Sept. 11 attacks, the West Nile virus, the anthrax-laced letters sent through the mail, the worldwide outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS...
|
|
WashingtonPost: As SE Asian Farms Boom, Stage Set for a Pandemic
|
BANGLANE, Thailand -- Prathum Buaklee stepped nimbly along the aging planks running between the cages of his chicken farm, shoveling grain with his meaty hands from a bucket into the feed trays. His feet were bare and caked with dirt. The old plaid shirt hanging on his stocky frame was soiled. And the air was rank with the smell of feathers, droppings and feed.
This soft-spoken farmer is part of an agrarian revolution in Southeast Asia and China that has more than doubled poultry production in barely a decade, bringing pickup trucks, air conditioning and other trappings of prosperity to long-destitute peasants and more protein to the diets of hundreds of millions of ordinary Asians.
But with chickens now packed into farmyards alongside other livestock, international health experts warn that conditions are set for a bird flu pandemic that could kill millions worldwide if the virus developed into a form capable of spreading among humans.
In its current form, the disease kills about three-quarters of the people who catch it from birds. Since the beginning of last year, 45 people in the region have been infected. Twelve Vietnamese and one Cambodian have died this year...
|
|
NYTimes: A Medical Mystery Man Bounces Back From Avian Flu
|
Hanoi, Vietnam: IT started as a mild fever and severe chills on Jan. 9 that made Nguyen Thanh Hung's teeth chatter even when his wife, a nurse, covered him with blankets.
But within two days, as the avian influenza virus took hold, his temperature soared to 106.7 degrees and peaked close to that level every day for the next five days as he struggled for life in one of this city's best hospitals. Most of his right lung collapsed, every joint ached and the far wall of his hospital room seemed to approach and recede before his eyes.
"My whole skull hurt," he said, gripping his temples for emphasis. "It felt like pieces of my skull were detaching."
What happened next is one of two medical mysteries in Mr. Hung's case that have caught the attention of flu experts as they try to decipher whether his illness will come to afflict millions of people, and possibly hundreds of millions, around the world. Unlike most people with confirmed cases of bird flu, Mr. Hung survived, for reasons that remain unclear but may have to do with his extraordinary physical fitness. The greater mystery is how he caught the disease, with strong evidence that he acquired it from his older brother, not from poultry, in a worrisome sign that the virus may be developing the ability to pass from person to person.
The World Health Organization has confirmed 14 cases of avian influenza in Vietnam this winter. Thirteen have died. Mr. Hung, 42, is the 14th case. Three weeks after he fell sick, he is already home from the hospital, tending his beloved bonsai teees, strumming his guitar and jogging a remarkable 14 miles a day.
International flu experts fear what could happen if the A(H5N1) avian influenza virus now circulating here were to recombine with human influenza to produce a virus capable of passing easily from person to person, causing a global pandemic...
|
|
|
|