ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending April 4th, 2005

Five members of a family that ran a chicken farm in northern Vietnam have tested positive for bird flu, health officials said Tuesday. Initial tests showed the H5N1 virus was present in samples taken from a 35-year-old man, his 32-year-old wife and their three daughters, said Nguyen Van Vy, director of Haiphong Health Department.

The family had raised more than 400 chickens. About half of the poultry began dying at the beginning of the month, and the family then ate some of the chickens, he said. Though doctors can't completely rule out human-to-human transmission, they believe the family contracted the illness through direct contact with the birds, said Nguyen Tran Hien, director of the Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology. Final test results are pending.

"I'm not very worried (about human-to-human transmission) because they all got sick at the same time, so it's more likely that they got infected from the same source," he said, Overall, 48 people in the region have been killed by the deadly virus, which first emerged on poultry farms in December 2003.

Health experts have warned the bird flu virus could mutate...

The World Health Organization released its global tuberculosis figures on Thursday, World Tuberculosis Day, and much was made of the news that incidence rates are declining or stable in five out of six of the report's regions. But the global incidence rate is still rising, and every day, tuberculosis kills 5,000 people, nearly all of them in underdeveloped countries. We are still losing the battle against the disease, and it is time to admit that prescribing more of the same just won't work. .

A big part of the problem is the increasing number of patients with the deadly combination of TB and the AIDS virus, which renders both diagnosis and treatment more difficult. From my native Ethiopia to Cambodia, tuberculosis is the No. 1 killer of people with HIV and AIDS. In Khayelitsha, the poor township where I work, one in every four adults is infected with HIV. Tuberculosis incidence rates

here are 1,122 per 100,000 people per year, nearly 10 times the global rate. Often, the only diagnostic tool I have is the sputum test, a procedure invented in 1882. . In ideal conditions and in the absence of HIV infection, the sputum test detects 75 percent of pulmonary tuberculosis infections. But for children, people with extrapulmonary tuberculosis and a majority of HIV patients with TB, the test is virtually useless. .

Like the sputum test, the only available medicines to treat the disease are from another era. They were invented three to five decades ago, and require patients to take four to six pills every day for up to eight months. . In many countries, patients have to go to separate clinics run by national tuberculosis programs several times a week to receive their medicines, and then wait for a counselor to watch them swallow their pills. This direct observation...

A bird flu outbreak in North Korea is probably extensive, South Korean officials said on Tuesday, but Pyongyang has yet to request Seoul's help to contain the virus. North Korea officially confirmed on Sunday an outbreak of bird flu at two chicken farms in the capital Pyongyang. It said hundreds of thousands of birds had been culled in the secretive state, which suffers from severe food shortages.

"We suspect that it has spread quite extensively looking from the way North Korea disclosed this," said Unification Ministry official Kim Chun-sik, who oversees exchanges with the North.

Other ministry officials said Seoul was ready to help and would like more details about the outbreak in order to tailor an assistance package. South Korea's National Veterinary Research and Quarantine Service sent a message to its equivalent in the North with an offer of assistance and a request for information on the outbreak. "What we are focusing on now is quarantine," Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Hong-jae said by telephone.

The South Korean government has stepped up quarantine measures at border points with the North and also at poultry farms in northern Kyonggi province, which borders the North. Migratory birds are being tracked for tests, a Kyonggi official said. Shares in fisheries firms extended their rally in Seoul on Tuesday, after turning up sharply on Monday on news of the bird flu outbreak in the North. Yonhap news agency reported a businessman who works closely with the North as saying the outbreak had spread to rural areas and poultry was not being sold in markets.

An official with the World Health Organization said on Monday the group had been contacted by Pyongyang about the outbreak and they would coordinate work on counter-measures. The report on Sunday marked the first time the North has said it had a bird flu outbreak. Its official media said there were no human infections...

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...

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..