ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending April 11th, 2005

The World Health Organization is investigating an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in northwestern Angola, it said Friday.

As of Thursday, 205 cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever had been reported in the country, and 180 of those affected had died. Seven provinces have been affected, the latest being Zaire province, where six cases have been reported, the WHO said in its most recent update.

"It is a very, very dangerous and lethal virus in human beings," Mike Ryan, director of alert and response operations for WHO, told CNN. The virus -- in the same family as the Ebola virus -- spreads through blood and body fluid contact. In this case -- only the second natural outbreak of the virus -- there is evidence it has been amplified through ineffective containment in hospitals, Ryan said. According to WHO, the first large outbreak under natural conditions occurred from 1998-2000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some Angolans have taken their anxiety out on health workers.

Mobile surveillance teams in Uige were forced to suspend operations Thursday when vehicles were attacked and damaged by residents, the WHO said Friday. "As the situation has not improved, no surveillance teams were operational today in the province."

In addition, organization staff in Uige were notified Friday of several workers' fatalities, but teams were unable to investigate the causes of death or collect the bodies for burial. Discussions "to find urgent solutions" were under way with provincial authorities, the WHO said. A WHO worker in Angola told CNN that health workers had been killed by residents who erroneously believed the workers were exposing them to the virus...

Despite the nation's deadly 2001 experience with anthrax in the mail, federal scientists have not agreed on a method to determine whether workplaces, postal facilities or other sites that might have been exposed are free of contamination, according to a congressional study.

The lack of certified anthrax sampling procedures means "there can be little confidence in negative results," the Government Accountability Office reported. Nor can U.S. environmental and health experts answer with confidence what GAO investigators called the basic question: "Is this building contaminated?"

The report is the latest in a series of government reviews that have questioned the effectiveness of the country's bioterrorism response plans. The Washington area has experienced several false alarms prompted by new biological agent detection systems. They include last month's incident at two Pentagon-related mail facilities; a February 2004 report of the toxin ricin in a Senate office building; and a November 2003 alarm at a Navy mail processing center in Anacostia.

A separate draft report that examined the response by local governments to March 14 incidents at two Defense Department mail facilities concluded that uncertainty over testing "muddied the communications flow" and confused the public. During the incidents, defense officials shut down Pentagon mail delivery and placed 900 workers on preventive antibiotics. Authorities later blamed "quality control problems" at a contract testing laboratory for contaminating a key sample.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security, which requested the GAO study, said its findings expose a risk to homeland security.

"Every false positive brings multiple federal agencies stumbling to the scene with no real plan, and every false negative risks complacency in the face of a lethal threat..

Angola's death toll from an Ebola-like virus has climbed to 126, the Health Ministry and World Health Organization said Thursday, making it the deadliest recorded outbreak of the rare Marburg disease. There is no vaccine or cure for Marburg, which spreads through bodily fluids and can kill rapidly, according to the World Health Organization. The virus was identified only last week as the death toll spiraled.

The worst outbreak of the virus on record killed 123 in neighboring Congo between 1998 and 2000. That was also the last known outbreak. Angola has recorded 132 cases of the Marburg virus over the past six months, the ministry and WHO said in a joint statement.

Almost all the deaths have occurred in the northern province of Uige, which lies on the border with Congo and since last year has received tens of thousands of refugees returning home after fleeing to the neighboring country to escape Angola's civil war. About three-quarters of cases have occurred in children under 5, and a small number of health care workers are among those adults infected, WHO said last week.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said Wednesday it was sending experts to the Southwest African country...

Warning that the United States has escaped catastrophic biological attack largely by luck, the presidential commission on intelligence urged the American government on Thursday to intensify its efforts to block any biological assaults by terrorist groups or other countries

The recommendation, which was made in some of the most strident language found in the 601-page report, came even though the commission, like others before it, confirmed that the United States was wrong in its assertion that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons before the start of the war with Iraq in 2003.

In other places around the globe, including Afghanistan, United States intelligence officials have apparently underestimated progress by terrorists and others in developing biological weapons, which are much cheaper to use and easier to acquire than a nuclear bomb, the report said.

"The threat is deeply troubling today; it will be more so tomorrow," it said. "The intelligence community, and the government as a whole, needs to approach the problem with a new urgency and new strategies."

Global searches by the Central Intelligence Agency and other investigators for evidence of stockpiles of bacteria like anthrax, toxins like ricin, or viruses like smallpox or the plague have been inadequate, the report said. Even publicly available sources of information about biological weapons were not being monitored closely enough, the report said.

The effort suffered, the report said, from "a poorly focused collection process that is ill equipped to gather and sort through the wealth of information that could help alert the community to crucial indicators of biological weapons activity."

Evidence of the severity of the threat were widespread, it said. Anthrax-tainted letters killed five people in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. The anthrax scare crippled mail delivery in several cities in the United States and required a cleanup costing more than $1 billion, the report said. In 1995, it further noted, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin on subway trains in Tokyo, killing 12.

Although the United States planned to spend $5.6 billion over the next decade to stockpile new vaccines...

President Bush signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the government to impose a quarantine to deal with any outbreak of a particularly lethal variation of influenza now found in Southeast Asia.

The order is intended to deal with a type of influenza commonly referred to as bird flu. Since January 2004, an estimated 69 people, primarily in Vietnam, have contracted the disease. But Dr. Keiji Fukuda, a flu expert at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, has said he suspects there are more cases.

The fatality rate among those reported to have contracted the disease is about 70 percent. Health officials around the world are trying to monitor the virus because some flu pandemics are thought to have begun with birds. Mr. Bush's order added pandemic influenza to the government's list of communicable diseases for which a quarantine is authorized. It gives the government authority to detain or isolate a passenger arriving in the United States to prevent an infection from spreading.

The authority would be used only if the passenger posed a threat to public health and refused to cooperate with a voluntary request, the Department of Health and Human Services said. The quarantine list was amended in 2003 to include SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed nearly 800 people in 2003. Other diseases on the list are cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever and viral hemorrhagic fevers.

Quarantine and isolation were last used during the SARS outbreak in 2003. The last large-scale quarantine was during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, though there have been lesser quarantines - for instance, travelers coming off airliners or cruise ships who have been exposed to curable diseases.

Jennifer Morcone, a spokeswoman for the health centers, said Mr. Bush's executive order was intended to prepare for all options...

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...