ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending May 15th, 2005

GP today accused governments around the world of failing to face up to the global threat of avian flu.

Sussex doctor Nigel Higson warned that the human disaster of the Asian tsunami "pales into insignificance" in comparison to the "hundreds of millions of lives" which an avian flu pandemic would claim.

He wants governments to join forces internationally to work on developing a vaccine against avian flu as well as collaborating on the manufacture of drugs to help fight an outbreak of the potentially killer virus.

Dr Higson, a GP in Hove who is chairman of the primary care virology group, also wants to see GPs in the UK trained in how to cope with a flu epidemic or pandemic.

He said GPs need to understand the day-to-day practicalities of working in an epidemic environment, how to diagnose proper flu and how to administer and store anti-viral drugs which they are currently not used to handling.

Dr Higson's comments appear in a letter in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal which is published today.

He wrote: "It is many years since a pandemic struck, and people have become complacent in that time. For governments to bury their heads in the sand may have some benefits in many political areas but it will be disastrous in terms of pandemic planning."

The letter comes two months after the Department of Health (DoH) published its Pandemic Flu: UK Influenza Pandemic Contingency Plan - a 137-page action plan for coping with an outbreak of avian flu which the DoH predicts will kill around 50,000 people a year in the UK...

Government-funded researchers tested AIDS drugs on hundreds of foster children over the past two decades, often without providing them a basic protection afforded in federal law and required by some states, an Associated Press review has found.

The research funded by the National Institutes of Health spanned the country. It was most widespread in the 1990s as foster care agencies sought treatments for their HIV-infected children that weren't yet available in the marketplace.

The practice ensured that foster children - mostly poor or minority - received care from world-class researchers at government expense, slowing their rate of death and extending their lives. But it also exposed a vulnerable population to the risks of medical research and drugs that were known to have serious side effects in adults and for which the safety for children was unknown.

The research was conducted in at least seven states - Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas - and involved more than four dozen different studies. The foster children ranged from infants to late teens, according to interviews and government records.

Several studies that enlisted foster children reported patients suffered side effects such as rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections.

In one study, researchers reported a "disturbing" higher death rate among children...

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...