ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending January 31st, 2005

WASHINGTON Earlier this month in a Washington wargame, 11 former ministers and heads of government from Europe and North America confronted a threat no one should ever have to face: the use of contagious disease as a weapon.

Atlantic Storm was designed to provoke imagination and to prompt action by making the reality of deliberate epidemics more vivid and by underscoring our shared responsibility to prevent, but also to prepare for, such a threat.

Faced with tragic choices, Atlantic Storm leaders largely agreed on appropriate responses. Although they worried about sharing the vaccine to the simulated contagion with "have-not" allies, in the end they took courageous steps to vaccinate half the planet. This left the question: How, exactly, could we carry out a decision to immunize three billion people in the real world?

The Atlantic Storm scenario - destructive and disruptive as it was - could have been much worse. Unless we forge new health security alliances to meet the bioterrorist threat, an attack of mass lethality is not a matter of whether it will happen, but when.

Just as Atlantic Storm began, the scientific journal Nature announced the development of biological techniques that permit rapid synthesis of large viruses from non-living parts. This will help researchers seeking new drugs and vaccines. But it also puts the synthesis of large viruses such as smallpox within the reach of thousands of laboratories around the world. The age of engineered biological weapons is here, today. It is not science fiction...

The world needs an effort similar to that behind the creation of the atomic bomb to tackle the multi-faceted threat of biowarfare, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday.

"We need to do something that even dwarfs the Manhattan project," Frist told the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Manhattan project was the codename for the United States's World War II effort to devise an atomic weapon.

"The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat it has the power of panic and paralysis to be global."

He predicted that the world would experience another bioweapon attack within the next decade, following the limited casualties seen when anthrax was sent through the U.S. mail system in 2001.

Next time, the death rate could be a much, much higher, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor John Deutch.

An attack using the smallpox virus is overwhelmingly the largest risk, he believes.

The disease was officially eradicated three decades ago but Deutch said it was possible former Soviet stocks were still at large or even that small quantities could be extracted from graves. "Every country has a vulnerability here," he said.

In a bid to protect citizens, the U.S. government has ordered millions of doses of smallpox vaccine as part of a wide-ranging security drive in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Other governments are also following suit in stocking up on smallpox shots. But experts warned that other avenues were open to would-be terrorists, with diseases such as plague and Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus options for weaponisation...

Medical sleuths puzzling over three related bird flu cases in Thailand last fall now strongly believe that two women who cared for a sick child both caught the virus from the girl.

This is not the first evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus, which has killed more than three dozen people in Thailand and Vietnam since the outbreak last year. In 1997, scientists believe bird flu also spread between people in rare cases in Hong Kong. Also, last week, Vietnamese officials were investigating another suspected person-to-person bird flu case involving two brothers in Hanoi.

People normally catch bird flu from infected birds, usually chickens and ducks. International health experts are not worried about limited person-to-person transmission. Their biggest fear is a mutation of the virus into a form that passes easily between people, which could lead to a deadly flu pandemic. So far, there is no evidence the virus is changing into a more dangerous form..

Vietnam on Thursday confirmed the sixth human death from bird flu in three weeks and neighboring Thailand recorded its first case among poultry this year as health experts expressed concern about a possible repeat of last year's devastating outbreak.

About 330,000 birds have died or been slaughtered because of the virus in Vietnam this year, and the World Health Organization is worried infection could spread rapidly with the start of the Feb. 9 Lunar New Year holiday. Chicken is the centerpiece of Vietnamese meals during the festivities known as Tet.

Since Tet is a time when people are traveling and more poultry is going to the market ... there is, of course, a high risk of the spread of the virus and infection," said Hans Troedsson, WHO's representative in Vietnam.

Troedsson said there is an urgent need for more research to better understand some of the mysteries surrounding the disease, including the ways in which it is transmitted and why it tends to often affect younger people, especially children..

Health professionals applauded the government's new recommendation that rape victims and occasional intravenous drug users get emergency drug treatment to prevent the AIDS virus, describing it as "progressive" and "a safety net."

The seismic shift in policy, announced Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, says a preventative regimen of drugs should be given to anyone exposed to HIV from rapes, accidents or isolated episodes of drug use or unsafe sex. The previous recommendation, made in 1996, had been only for health care workers accidentally exposed on the job.

"We have probably the most conservative administration in the last 50 years, and yet the CDC is coming out with a policy that is more progressive than perhaps any country's in the world," said Dr. Josh Bamberger of the San Francisco public health department, who helped craft the city's prophylactic HIV treatment plan.

Imaginary patients started stumbling into emergency rooms in Munich and Frankfurt, then Istanbul and Los Angeles, and within hours after the start of a war game yesterday, Western intelligence agencies concluded that there had been a choreographed attack on numerous cities by terrorists wielding smallpox pathogens.

By mid-afternoon, health experts realized that millions of people worldwide would soon die agonizing deaths. World leaders - or at least people posing as them - who were assembled at a mock Washington summit yesterday interrupted each other and waved their arms as they debated potential real-life choices. Perhaps the most important: Would wealthy nations that possess smallpox vaccine share it with their unprepared neighbors?

The exercise, called Atlantic Storm, featured former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright as the U.S. president and eight current or former high-ranking officials of America's European allies - such as Britain, France and Germany role-playing as the prime ministers of their respective countries. In the war-game scenario, they were gathered for a routine Washington summit to discuss problems such as the global response to the South Asian tsunami when word emerged of a rampaging virus...

A man was arrested after authorities allegedly found the deadly toxin ricin stashed in a cardboard box at his home along with a small cache of weapons, officials said Thursday.

Steven Michael Ekberg, 22, faces up to 10 years if convicted of possession of a biological agent. FBI agents said they didn't believe Ekberg, arrested Wednesday, had any connection with terrorist groups.

There was no explanation for how or why he obtained the ricin. Ricin can be fatal if ingested, inhaled or injected. There is no antidote.

"The chemical substance is derived from the castor bean and that's a natural substance. I don't think castor beans are difficult to obtain," said FBI Special Agent Jeff Westcott in Jacksonville.

The suspect's mother, who lives with her son, told reporters that he is "not a bad kid."

The fifth case of human bird flu in two weeks in Vietnam has raised fears of a new epidemic. A 35-year-old woman is reported to be in a critical condition, after being taken hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. The four earlier cases have been fatal. Bird flu swept through Asia last year, killing more than 30 people and leading to culls of poultry in 10 countries. A World Health Organization (WHO) expert has warned that many more could die if the virus is not contained.

"If strong measures are not in place, the epidemic can spread to an unmeasurable extent," Hans Troedsso was quoted as saying at a conference in Hanoi on Thursday.

The latest victim, from Vietnam's southern Mekong Delta province, had reportedly been hired by a neighbour to bury dead ducks and to pluck sick ducks' feathers for sale. She developed a fever and breathing difficulties a few days ago, doctors said. The outbreak in Vietnam was first reported last month, when the authorities said some 4,000 chickens had either died or been culled in the south of the country.

More than 100 million birds have died or been killed around Asia last year because of the bird flu virus. The virus has killed 25 people in Vietnam and 12 in Thailand over the last 12 months..

Researchers have made an unexpectedly sudden advance in synthesizing long molecules of DNA, bringing them closer to the goal of redesigning genes and programming cells to make pharmaceuticals.

But the success also puts within reach the manufacture of small genomes, such as those of viruses and perhaps certain bacteria. Some biologists fear that the technique might be used to make the genome of the smallpox virus, one of the few pathogens that cannot easily be collected from the wild.

The advance, described in the Jan. 6 issue of the journal Nature by Dr. George M. Church of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Xiaolian Gao of the University of Houston, involves the use of a new technique to synthesize a DNA molecule 14,500 chemical units in length. The molecule contained a string of 21 genes used by a harmless laboratory bacterium.

The full power of the technique is still being explored, but genomes like that of the smallpox virus - 186,000 chemical units long - seem well within reach. Dr. Church has completed the first part of a plan to synthesize the 777,000-unit genome of a small bacterium known as Mycoplasma mobile.

"This has the potential for a revolutionary impact in the ease of synthesis of large DNA molecules," said Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University with an interest in bioterrorism.

"This will permit efficient and rapid synthesis of any select agent virus genome in very short order," he added, referring to the list of dangerous pathogens and toxins that possessors are required to register with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Ebright said any facility possessing the new DNA synthesis equipment should be assumed capable of making any virus on the select agent list.

The genetic sequences of smallpox and many other dangerous pathogens are easily obtained because they were deposited in public databases as an aid to medical researchers at a time when synthesizing large DNA molecules seemed prohibitively expensive or impossible...

9-year-old boy in Vietnam has died of bird flu, bringing the number of people in the country killed by the virus to 21, a doctor said Wednesday.

The boy from the southern Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh was admitted to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City early Tuesday morning and died later that day, hospital deputy director Tran Tinh Hien said.

"He was tested positive for H5N1 virus," Hien said, refering to the strain of the virus that is deadly to humans.

World health experts fear that bird flu might mutate and create the next influenza pandemic. So far, there has been no concrete evidence of human-to-human transmission of bird flu. Only Vietnam and Thailand have recorded human deaths from the virus.

Vietnam may face fresh outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus next month as poultry is transported around the country ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations in February, the World Health Organization said.

The WHO warning comes after a 16-year-old girl remained in a stable condition in Ho Chi Minh after doctors confirmed she was infected with the virus. "As avian influenza viruses become more active at cooler temperature, further poultry outbreaks, possibly accompanied by sporadic human cases, can be anticipated," the U.N. health agency said...