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Archived News Week ending March 28th, 2005
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AP: Bird Flu in North Korea
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North Korea (news - web sites) acknowledged an outbreak of bird flu for the first time, saying Sunday that hundreds of thousands of chickens were killed to prevent its spread, and the disease was not passed on to humans.
The outbreaks occurred at a "few chicken farms," and "hundreds of thousands of infected chickens" were burned before burial, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported.
The short report said no breeders who work at the farms were known to have been infected.
"A dynamic work is now under way in different parts of the country to combat bird flu that plagues the world," KCNA reported, adding that government ministries were working to contain the disease's spread.
The report did not say which strain of the virus had been discovered.
Earlier this month, South Korea (news - web sites)'s Yonhap news agency reported that bird flu had broken out in the North, and South Korean officials said a trading company here delayed plans to import 40 tons of poultry from North Korea but declined to say why. Japan also banned poultry imports from the North after the report.
The North said last year it was strengthening quarantine measures against bird flu following the outbreak of the virus in Southeast Asian countries, but it had not previously acknowledged the disease was present in the country.
The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has spread through poultry farms in Southeast Asia since December 2003 and killed at least 48 people. Health officials fear it could mutate into a form more easily transmittable between humans that might result in a global pandemic killing millions...
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WP: Biohazard Procedures to Change
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The Defense Department is changing how it handles biohazard threats, acknowledging that internal breakdowns delayed its response to a March 14 anthrax scare at the Pentagon and nearby office buildings, confused the rest of the federal government and alarmed state and local public health workers, officials said.
Under fire for gaps with civilian bioterrorism detection and response systems, military officials said they will quicken reporting of test results from biological sensors around their Arlington headquarters to no more than 24 hours and shift away from using contract laboratories. It took three days to get results from a contractor after the March 14 incident.
Defense officials acknowledged the need to align laboratory testing protocols with those used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also agreed that they should coordinate with local health officials when ordering emergency medical treatment for defense workers.
Pentagon representatives discussed the steps Friday during an "after-action" review chaired by Thomas J. Lockwood, national capital region coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security. Representatives from the White House, FBI, Health and Human Services Department and U.S. Postal Service, as well as state and local officials, were present.
Officials described preliminary results on condition of anonymity because the review is not complete and because multiple agencies are involved. One participant said the two-hour meeting evolved from a "tense" set of exchanges to "a real air of candid, . . . open sharing of information."
Valerie Smith, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said: "Federal, state and local agencies involved in [the] mail facility situation had an after-action review meeting [Friday] to discuss the event and analyze protocols, coordination and response. Meeting to discuss these issues gives all parties the opportunity to learn from past experience."
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ordered..
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NYT: Angolan Epidemic Identified as Marburg Fever
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Health officials urged travelers on Wednesday to avoid Uge Province, in northern Angola, after the World Health Organization identified the Marburg virus as the source of an epidemic that has killed at least 95 Angolans since October.
The Marburg virus, a close relative of Ebola, has been identified in Uganda, Kenya and Congo, where the last major outbreak was recorded from 1998 to 2000. But it had not been found before in Angola.
In recent months, tens of thousands of refugees from Angola's 21-year civil war have passed through Uge, returning from neighboring Congo under a repatriation program sponsored by the United Nations. United Nations officials suspended the program last week as evidence of the disease spread.
Three in four Angolan victims were 5 or younger, officials said, and some of the adults were health care workers who had come in direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected persons. At least seven more Angolans are infected with the virus, officials said.
The virus causes a high fever, diarrhea, vomiting and extensive hemorrhaging in the lungs and digestive tract. There is no cure or effective treatment. Victims in the Angola outbreak have generally died within a week of the onset of symptoms, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. The incubation, from infection to onset of the illness, is 5 to 10 days.
The virus was first discovered in 1967, when monkeys imported from Uganda infected laboratory workers in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany, and Belgrade, Yugoslavia. It is spread largely by direct contact with infected people, and human outbreaks are ...
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AFP: British Bird Flu could kill 750,000
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Hundreds of thousands of people may die and one quarter of the work force could be absent if Britain were hit by a bird flu pandemic, a senior government official said.
"It may be somewhere between 20,000 and 750,000 extra deaths and it may be 25 percent of the population off work," the government official, speaking on a non-attributable basis, told a conference in London.
"That is the shape of the event we are going to have to deal with," he said.
Britain's population is nearly 60 million people, with 28 million working, according to government figures.
Contingency plans already announced by Britain's health department include the stockpiling of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu at a cost of 200 million pounds (380 million dollars, 290 million euros).
The country's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has also previously described a national preparedness plan the government is ready to put in place should the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus develop into a new strain that spreads from human to human.
Measures include closing schools and cancelling public gatherings like football matches and pop concerts, as well as issuing travel warnings.
The estimate of 750,000 dead put forward was described later Tuesday by a health department spokeswoman as a "theoretical upper limit" of a catastrophe.
She said the government was sticking to its estimate of 50,000 British deaths, a number advanced earlier this month when it published its contingency plan.
The higher figure, presented to an international forum at the International Institute for Strategic Studies came days, came days after a leading scientist warned that the government's estimate was "optimistic".
Professor Hugh Pennington, president of the Society for General Microbiology, said he believed up to two million Britons could perish from a mutated form of the H5N1 virus.
He has criticised current planning for an outbreak, warning that a strain affecting humans will be "here before we know it".
Though the government has ordered 14.6 million vaccine doses for Britain they will take up to two years to arrive, prompting some worries that the population could be at risk...
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Drudge Report: Gene study of mutant AIDS virus shows drug-resistant, vicious foe...
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A genetic study of a strain of AIDS (news - web sites) virus that triggered a health alert in New York describes the pathogen as unique, resistant to almost every class of HIV (news - web sites) drug and apparently able to wreck the immune system with unprecedented speed.
US researchers unravelled the DNA identity of the mutated virus after it was found in a New York man who is believed to have progressed to full-blown AIDS just months after becoming infected, rather than years, as is usually the case.
The unidentified man, aged in his late 40s, had had unprotected anal sex with multiple male partners and regularly took methamphetamine, or "ice" -- an outlawed stimulant that heightens sexual appetite and lowers inhibitions.
In a study published on Saturday in The Lancet, a team led by Martin Markowitz of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, identify the 3-DCR virus as a mutated strain of the B subtype of HIV-1, the most widespread of the two main branches of AIDS virus.
Its genetic map shows it to have, unusually, a double option for penetrating human immune cells, able to latch onto its target via two docking points, called receptors, on the cell surface.
In addition, the virus' mutated shape means it is impervious to the three of the four classes of anti-retroviral drugs designed to stop the virus from replicating in the immune cell.
The other class of drug, a small and very expensive category of treatments called fusion inhibitors, which are designed to prevent the virus from docking to the cell, may make headway against it, according to the DNA analysis...
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The Washinton Post: Rubella Virus Eliminated in U.S.
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The invisible "chain of transmission" of rubella virus has been broken in the United States. With it disappears a disease that a little more than a generation ago struck fear in the heart of every pregnant woman.
Fewer than 10 people a year in this country now contract the infection known popularly as German measles. Since 2002, all cases have been traceable to foreigners who carried the virus in from abroad.
Between those rare events, however, no rubella virus has circulated in the United States because the bug simply cannot find enough susceptible hosts. After years of assiduous vaccination, virtually the entire U.S. population is immune.
Mild and often entirely unnoticed in children, rubella infection can be devastating to developing fetuses. A woman infected with the virus in the first three months of pregnancy will probably suffer miscarriage, or deliver a stillborn or permanently disabled child. In the last great U.S. epidemic of rubella -- 40 years ago, before there was a vaccine against the disease -- about 12,000 babies were born deaf or deaf and blind.
The outbreak so swelled the number of congenitally deaf Americans that Gallaudet University, the District's educational institution for the hearing-impaired, eventually acquired a second campus to accommodate them.
"This is a milestone," said Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It is a major step forward in our ability to eliminate this problem in the Western Hemisphere, and then in the world..."
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CNN: Children dying from Ebola-like illness
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The Ebola-like mystery ailment that has killed at least 39 people in Angola over the past three months is targeting primarily children under 5, the U.N. health agency said Friday.
While the disease in Angola's northern province of Uige has still not been identified, health officials believe the illness is an acute hemorrhagic fever related to the Ebola virus, said Dick Thompson, spokesman for the World Health Organization.
But unlike Ebola, which tends to predominantly affect the adult population, four out of five cases of this new ailment have been children, Thompson said.
"With Ebola, the age distribution is generally quite different than what we are seeing here," he said. "But we are not ruling Ebola out. We are not ruling anything out."
The symptoms of the virus -- including vomiting, bloody discharge and high fever -- are similar to those for Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers, including dengue fever, according to WHO.
Angolan officials have put the death toll at 64, but Thompson said the number is probably lower because deaths from other diseases may been included in the Angolan figure.
WHO has no estimates on how deadly the disease might be or how many cases already exist, he said.
"It is really impossible to know right now -- we are collecting information and waiting for lab tests to come back," Thompson said.
If the disease is a known substance, lab tests could provide conclusive data within a week, Thompson said, but warned...
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True Toll of Avian Flu Remains a Mystery
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While early reports of the deadliness of human avian influenza suggested that about 90 percent of the victims died, there are growing signs that the disease's true death rate is much lower - although still high enough to kill many millions of people if the worst fears about its spread come to fruition.
Few acute infectious diseases have death rates exceeding 5 or 10 percent. Exceptions are rabies, which is nearly always fatal, and Ebola and Lassa fever, with reported death rates ranging from 25 to 90 percent. The death rate for garden-variety flu for children, the elderly or the immuno-compromised is less than 1 percent in developed countries. At least 20 million people worldwide died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, with an estimated death rate of 2 percent.
As of yesterday, the death rate from A(H5N1) avian influenza in Southeast Asia was 67 percent: 46 deaths among 69 confirmed cases reported from Cambodia (1), Thailand (17) and Vietnam (51), according to the World Health Organization.
The death rate for bird flu is dwindling because it is easier to count people who die than those who may become infected and have minor symptoms, or none at all. This phenomenon of subclinical disease - a mild case of the bird flu, as it were - seems to be occurring with more frequency than previously appreciated.
For instance, the virus was detected in a healthy 81-year-old man in Vietnam and in a few others who barely knew they had been ill. If mild or symptomless cases are missed, the death rate will be skewed to falsely high levels.
On the grimmer side, other findings indicate that human bird flu infections may be more widespread than initially suspected and possibly transmitted by feces. The virus was found in a child with severe diarrhea and encephalitis, but no respiratory symptoms, leading health officials to ask doctors to consider testing feces for A(H5N1) virus more often...
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