ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending February 14th, 2005

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 trees, 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...