ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending March 21st, 2005

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...

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...

Health experts are watching the spread of deadly bird flu among humans with increasing concern after doctors reported a second suspected case yesterday among medical staff treating a victim. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has given a warning that the flu, which has killed 47 people in Asia, could mutate into a form that spreads quickly between humans and trigger a global pandemic.

Britain has stockpiled more than 14m courses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu at a cost of £200m, enough to treat a quarter of the population. The bird flu has a mortality rate of 60-80% and the government says 50,000 people could die if it takes hold here - four times the number who die each year from influenza.

So far there have been five suspected instances of bird flu among poultry in Britain, but no human cases. Health experts have called for a ban on imports of poultry feathers from Asia. Yesterday doctors at Bach Mai hospital in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, said a 41-year-old nurse had been admitted for treatment suffering classic symptoms of high fever, coughing and lung infection. Earlier it was confirmed that a 26-year-old male nurse had caught the H5N1 strain of the virus.

Both nurses had treated the same patient, a young man who is thought to have passed on the virus to other family members. He is in a critical condition.

Experts say there is a difference between a cluster of infections by a single victim and a chain of infection that jumps at random from one person to another. The Asian outbreak is so far limited to clusters. The H5N1 virus has killed ...

China has begun testing a new AIDS vaccine on a group of volunteers after they were given physical exams and signed waivers, the government said. A total of 49 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 50 will be part of the three-stage tests, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing Chen Jie, director of the disease control agency in southern China's Guangxi region.

The first stage of testing will last 14 months, Xinhua said. It didn't say what the stage was meant to test, but said the second would cover the immune nature and safety of the vaccine. Chinese drug regulators approved the tests last November.

At that time, state media said the vaccine, already tested on monkeys, was developed by Chinese scientists who have studied the genetics of the AIDS virus since 1996. The agency didn't offer further details of the tests or the vaccine.

China says it has 840,000 people infected with the AIDS virus and 80,000 with the full-blown disease. Health experts say the true figures are much higher and warn that China could have 10 million people infected by 2010 unless it takes action...

Experts say it is no longer a case of if but when a pandemic of bird flu hits the human population. Some countries have already started stockpiling drugs and testing vaccines to beat the virus. The UK government has been criticised for being slow on the uptake, but announced its full pandemic plan on Tuesday. We have to make up our minds now before it arrives on our doorstep

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently urged all countries to develop or update their influenza "pandemic preparedness plans" after experts estimated anywhere between two and 50 million people could die if a pandemic hits and the world is not prepared. Good health care will play a central role in reducing the impact, yet the pandemic itself could disrupt the supply of essential medicines and health care workers could fall ill.

Even in the best-case scenario, two million to seven million people would die and tens of millions would require medical attention, WHO says. Experts have used their knowledge about past pandemics, such as the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, and their experience with the strain of bird flu that has killed 42 people in Asia since 1997, to make a prototype vaccine. If this strain, called H5N1 and which spreads from birds to humans, mutates to spread between humans, scientists believe this vaccine should help beat a pandemic. However, a different strain might mutate to cause a pandemic. By having stocks of the prototype, scientists will be able to make modifications to the vaccine so it is effective...

Officials in Vietnam announced Tuesday that a 35-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl had tested positive for a potentially lethal bird flu virus known as H5N1, which has been spreading among chickens and other birds in Southeast Asia. These are the latest cases in what many public health officials worry is the possible beginning of a worldwide outbreak of a deadly new flu.

The virus has now killed millions of birds and infected more than 50 people, killing three out of every four patients. Now there is evidence that in rare cases it can spread from person to person.  "The virus is clearly going in what we call the wrong direction for us," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. The big concern is that the virus will mutate even more until it reaches the point that it spreads easily from person to person. The result would be what scientists call a pandemic - a worldwide outbreak of a virus to which people have no immunity.

That situation is what happened in 1918 when 20 million to 50 million people around the world died from a new strain of flu that also originated in birds. Experts agree there will be another flu pandemic, but no one knows when. "It absolutely dwarfs all other public health problems that we can imagine...