ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending May 8th, 2005

A gray sculpture depicts Japanese soldiers holding a Chinese man down as an army doctor injects him with what could be bubonic plague, cholera or anthrax virus. In another tableau, a Japanese doctor observes a person lying on the floor of a glass-walled chamber as the air pressure inside is raised to lethal levels.

Those are among the many horrific memories of Unit 731, a Japanese military base in northeast China used for germ warfare development before and during World War II, that live on at a Chinese museum built on the base's crumbling brick bones.

At least 3,000 people, including Chinese civilians, Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, were killed in tests of biological weapons and other experiments at Unit 731 between 1939 and 1945, Chinese state media say.

Biological weapons developed at the base are believed to have killed more than 200,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation. Now China wants to make the museum a U.N.-recognized memorial to Japanese war crimes. "Unit 731 did any kind of experiment they could think of and harmed a huge number of...

case of polio has been detected in Indonesia, World Health Organization officials said yesterday, indicating that an outbreak spreading from northern Nigeria since 2003 has crossed an ocean and reached the world's fourth most populous country.

The virus, found in a village on the island of Java, is most closely related to a strain that was found in Saudi Arabia in December, the officials said. The most likely explanations of how it got there are that it either was brought back by an Indonesian working in Saudi Arabia or by a pilgrim who went to Mecca in January.

Indonesia's last case was in 1995, and it is now the 16th country to be reinfected by a strain of the virus that broke out in northern Nigeria when vaccinations stopped there, then crossed Africa and the Red Sea.

Officials recommended that Indonesia immediately vaccinate five million children on the western end of Java, including the capital, Jakarta, to contain the virus. The country began planning such a drive last week, they said.

Indonesia has more Muslims than any other nation, and polio is now found almost exclusively in Muslim countries or regions.

Resistance to polio vaccine has been high from northern Nigeria to the Pakistan frontier because of persistent rumors that it is a Western plot to render Muslim girls infertile or to spread AIDS. Paradoxically, after several states in Muslim northern Nigeria halted vaccinations in 2003, it was purchases of Indonesian vaccine that persuaded wary imams and politicians to drop their opposition, because it is a Muslim country...

ne week after an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease at a Manhattan hospital was blamed for the death of a patient, a second medical center, Harlem Hospital Center, a few miles away, announced yesterday that it might have identified traces of the bacteria in one of its buildings.

The bacteria have now been detected in as many as three city hospital buildings in two months, highlighting what experts said was a barely visible but potentially deadly problem plaguing hospitals in the city.

In a statement issued yesterday, Harlem Hospital Center said that traces of what appeared to be legionella bacteria had turned up on a sink and a shower head at its Samuel L. Kountz Pavilion on West 136th Street but that there had been no confirmed cases of the disease or signs of it in its patients. It also said that although it was "superheating" its water supply and taking other steps to kill the bacteria, it would be roughly a week before it was determined for certain whether they were legionella.

In the meantime, the hospital said in its statement, "there is no evidence of any risk to any patients, visitors or staff."

The news came on the heels of a firestorm over Legionnaires' disease at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital just a few miles away, where four patients contracted the disease from tainted water at its Milstein building in March. Two of those patients later died, and an autopsy on one showed last week that Legionnaires' disease had been the cause. On the same day that NewYork-Presbyterian announced the results, the hospital disclosed that the water supply at a second building that it operates, the Greenberg Pavilion, on the Upper East Side, had also tested positive for the bacteria, though no cases have been diagnosed.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up to 18,000 people in the United States contract Legionnaires' disease each year, though it is rarely deadly unless those infected have weakened immune systems...

Health officials have worried for years about the high rate of HIV among African Americans. Now the federal Centers for Disease Control is examining how one group, known as men on the "down low," could be spreading the disease among black women.

Men on the down low have sex with other men while keeping a heterosexual public identity. Recent books and articles about black men on the DL, as it is also called, have raised concerns that they pass HIV to unsuspecting wives and girlfriends.

But because the down low is defined by secrecy, almost nothing is known about the number of men of any race who are on the down low, how many have HIV or AIDS, or their sexual activity.

At a time when black women are being diagnosed with HIV at a rate 20 times that of white women, five CDC studies will be among the first to try to learn how many white, black, Asian and Latino men fit the down-low profile; identify how, if at all, being on the down low differs from being "in the closet," and determine whether down-low men have a role in infecting...

Dangerous mistakes at a hospital in Angola in recent days could undo the work of medical teams who have been battling an epidemic of the deadly Marburg virus, the World Health Organization reported on Friday.

Twice in the past week, doctors at the provincial hospital in the northern city of Uíge were exposed to blood from infected patients, and so are now at risk of developing the disease themselves. The virus causes a hemorrhagic fever that can be fatal within a week.

The outbreak in Angola, the largest on record, has killed 255 of the 275 people known to be infected. The epidemic was identified on March 21, but is believed to have started weeks or months earlier. The recent incidents at the hospital in Uíge occurred even though virus experts from around the world, working there for a month, had personally scrubbed down the hospital wards with bleach and developed new systems meant to prevent lapses in infection control.

The Marburg virus is spread by contact with bodily fluids like blood, vomit and urine, so preventing exposure to those fluids is an essential part of stopping an epidemic.

"These high-risk exposures should not have occurred," the health organization said.

Two other mishaps threatened patients. In one, the report said, "the body of a deceased patient was left, uncleaned and uncollected, on an open ward for more than eight hours, placing hospital staff and other patients at risk."

In another case, staff members put a baby into the cot of a child who had just died of Marburg virus, without first disinfecting the cot...

Traditional healers here say their grandmothers knew of a bleeding disease similar to the current epidemic of hemorrhagic fever that has killed 244 of the 266 people who have contracted it. The grandmothers even had a treatment for the sickness, the healers told Dr. Boris I. Pavlin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the remedy has been lost. The old disease was called kifumbe, the word in the Kikongo language for murder.

But kifumbe did not seem to be contagious. And so, Dr. Pavlin said, though he did not doubt it was real, it was probably not the same as the disease in Ua­ge today. The current disease, caused by the Marburg virus, is contagious. Like the Ebola virus, to which it is closely related, it is spread by bodily fluids like blood, vomit and saliva.

No one can say for sure what kifumbe (pronounced key-FOOM-bay) was, and in some ways the Marburg virus is almost as mysterious. More than a month has passed since it was identified as the cause of the deadly outbreak here - the largest Marburg epidemic on record - but some of the most basic questions about the epidemic have yet to be answered. How and when did this rare virus get here? Why have so many victims been children? And how could so many have become infected before the disease was recognized?

The high death rate, over 90 percent, is also puzzling, but it is too soon to tell whether the rate is really that high. In past outbreaks, mortality has been lower. In Ua­ge, milder cases may be going unrecognized.

"It is easier to count the dead people," said Dr. Pierre Rollin, a physician in the special pathogens branch of the C.D.C. "The numbers in the beginning don't mean anything."

Viral hemorrhagic fevers, a handful of diseases found only in Africa and South America, are among the most frightening of all illnesses. Ebola and Marburg, limited to Africa, are the only members of a family known as filoviruses...