ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending September 4th, 2005

The tuberculosis bacterium emerged in East Africa three million years ago and may have spread around the world when early humans left their ancestral home. According to molecular analysis of modern strains, the pathogen is much older than previously thought.

As such, it predates other human afflictions such as the plague.

French researchers hope the work will lead to improved diagnosis and treatment of TB, which kills three million people each year. TB is re-emerging in areas such as Eastern Europe, south east Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, due to the spread of drug-resistant strains of the disease and the rise in HIV.

It is caused by the bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which attacks the lungs, giving rise to symptoms such as coughing, loss of appetite, fever, and night sweats.

TB has long been a human disease - tissue samples from Egyptian mummies over 4,000 years old show signs of infection. Until now, scientists had believed the disease arose a few tens of thousands of years ago and then spread rapidly around the world. But investigation of a rare tuberculosis-causing bacterium isolated from patients in East Africa suggests the roots of the disease go back much further.

Molecular analysis suggests that the East African samples and the commoner strains are all descended from a more ancient bacterial species that emerged in Africa as long as three million years ago....

Russian officials have quarantined a large poultry farm in Siberia because of a suspected outbreak of bird flu, news reports said Saturday. If confirmed, it would be the first major occurrence of the lethal virus among birds in Russia, and international health officials expressed concern that the disease had spread closer to Western Europe.

About 142,000 birds are being monitored at a commercial farm in the Omsk region of Siberia, 1,400 miles east of Moscow, the Russian news agency Interfax reported, quoting a federal agency that tracks the disease. The presence of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza was reported last month in Siberia, but only among wild birds and free-range chickens on small family farms.

Avian influenza has killed at least 61 people in Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia since early last year, mostly farmers and poultry workers in close contact with the animals. Millions of birds have been slaughtered in Asia in an attempt to control the disease.

The World Health Organization has warned that the viral strain affecting chickens, ducks and wild fowl could develop into a form that spreads easily among humans, exposing millions of people to the disease...

Health officials in New York are working with increasing urgency to develop a defense in case a deadly strain of influenza begins to spread widely.

The city and state health departments are concerned about a dangerous strain of avian flu that continues to sweep across Asia, infecting millions of birds. While the virus is not easily transmissible from person to person at this point, scientists are worried about the theoretical possibility that it could combine with a more common form of influenza and become a rapidly spreading killer.

New York City health officials have been meeting every two weeks since February to develop a response plan. They hope to have an updated draft ready in the next few weeks. At about the same time, the state hopes to have its draft plan ready as well.

"It may never happen," said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a deputy city health commissioner who is leading the flu planning, referring to the development of the strain. "But on the scale of emergency planning, this is high on the list."

As part of their preparations, the leaders of the frontline forces of New York's disaster preparedness teams will run a "tabletop" simulation involving more than a dozen city and state departments next month that will envision the city facing a situation similar to the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918, which left at least 33,000 dead in the city alone. At least 20 million to 40 million people died worldwide. The exercise is designed to test the emergency response system by challenging leaders to make quick decisions and seeing if and where communication breaks down or resources run out.

If a pandemic similar to the one of 1918 occurred today, as many as 2.8 million New York City residents could be infected within months, sending more than 200,000 to the hospital and clogging the morgues with 400 deaths a day during the peak infection period...

Significant numbers of chickens on sale in UK shops are contaminated with superbugs, a scientific survey commissioned by BBC One's Real Story suggests.

Of the British-grown chickens analysed, over half were contaminated with multi-drug resistant E.coli which is immune to the effects of three or more antibiotics.

More than a third of the 147 samples, which included overseas and UK produced chicken, had E.coli germs resistant to the important antibiotic Trimethoprim which is used to treat bladder infections.

The Health Protection Agency scientists testing the meat also found 12 chickens had antibiotic resistant Campylobacter.

And VRE, or Vancomycin Resistant Enteroccci, were in 1 in 25 of the samples, although more tests would be needed to confirm the exact type of the bug found. No organic chickens were used - 64 were from the UK and 83 from abroad.