ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending September 18th, 2005

A fungus that is deadly to many species of amphibians has been found in wild animals in the UK for the first time.

Chytrid fungus is a major contributor to the decline of amphibian populations around the world and may have already made one species extinct.

Its presence was detected in American bullfrogs that had set up home in two small lakes in South-East England.

Scientists are now trying to establish whether the fungal disease has spread to native amphibian species. It's pretty bad news that it has been found in the wild in this country Dr Andrew Cunningham, Zoological Society of London The fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has been found in captive animals in this country before, but never in the wild. It was identified by Dr Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and colleagues, and reported in the Veterinary Record.

The American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) is native to the central and eastern US and parts of Canada. The UK colony was probably derived from animals kept as pets that escaped or were released...

A BIRD flu pandemic in Australia could be more deadly for the nation than almost any sort of terrorist attack, Health Minister Tony Abbott has warned. He painted the worst-case scenario of thousands of possible deaths in Australia if there was a pandemic as Indonesia claimed its fourth likely victim from the bird flu.

And Indonesia's health minister has warned there could be further outbreaks to come.

Bird flu, which arrived in Asia in late 2003, has so far killed nearly 60 people in the region.

Public health experts fear the avian flu virus is mutating and could develop the ability to spread easily between humans, with the potential to kill millions in a flu pandemic. Mr Abbott said Australia has spent $160 million on measures trying to prepare for an outbreak, but still warns the results could be catastrophic if a pandemic were to occur.

"We don't know if a pandemic will happen ... but if one does happen, it will be a public health disaster the magnitude of which this country has not seen at least since 1919, when he had the last few pandemic," he said.

About 12,000 people died from the Spanish flu in Australia in 1919...

Amid further reports of bird deaths in Russia, just over the mountains that separate Asia from Europe, European countries were preparing Tuesday for the possibility that migratory birds might carry the dread avian influenza virus to Europe in coming months, and scientists were trying to understand more about the mysterious spread of the disease.

Since the A(H5N1) bird flu strain first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, outbreaks have become relatively common in China and Southeast Asia. Until recently, scientists believed that the major route of spread was through the transport of infected chickens and meat.

But in the last few months, outbreaks in which the virus appeared to have hopped from western China, to Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan - places that have little poultry trade between them - have highlighted anew the likelihood that wild birds have also disseminated the virus. That possibility is setting off alarms in countries along bird migration routes in Europe as summer comes to an end.

After conferring with a panel of experts, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality declared that as of this week all commercial chickens and turkeys in the Netherlands would have to be housed indoors or in outdoor pens that would prevent contact with wild birds. Germany announced that it is contemplating a similar plan, to be activated if surveillance shows that bird flu has arrived in Europe...

MEMBERS of Britain's elite have been selected as priority cases to receive scarce pills and vaccinations at the taxpayers expense if the country is hit by a deadly bird flu outbreak. Workers at the BBC and prominent politicians - such as cabinet ministers - would be offered protection from the virus.

Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, has already spent £1m to make sure his personal office and employees have their own emergency supplies of 100,000 antiviral tablets.

If there is an avian flu pandemic in the coming months there would be enough drugs to protect less than 2% of the British population for a week.

The Department of Health has drawn up a priority list of those who would be first to receive lifesaving drugs. Top of the list are health workers followed by those in key public sector jobs.

Although senior government ministers would be among the high-priority cases, the department said this weekend that it had not decided whether to include opposition politicians.

BBC employees would be protected because the corporation is required to broadcast vital information during a national disaster.

Politicians and the media have been placed before sick patients, heavily pregnant women and elderly people by government planners.

Yesterday, leading BBC presenters were surprised to learn that they would be given preferential treatment...

he Nepalese authorities say that 140 people have died of Japanese encephalitis - or brain fever - over the past two months. A spokesman for the health ministry said the mosquito-borne disease has affected more than 800 people.

Most of those affected are children and women in the south-western districts of Nepal, bordering India's Uttar Pradesh.

Encephalitis has killed more than 300 people in the state of Uttar Pradesh over the past month.

"The government has taken stringent measures to control the dreadful disease and is hectically spraying insecticide and distributing mosquito curtains so that the people may not be affected by it," ministry spokesman Hari Narayan Acharya said, the AFP news agency reports.

Most of the deaths occurred in the Nepalgunj, Banke and Kailali districts, he said.

Mr Acharya attributed the outbreak of the disease to the late delivery of vaccines. "The vaccines are urgently needed but the purchase tender was not finalised on time which caused the delay in receiving the medicines," he said. The disease normally spreads through mosquito-bites during the monsoon season, which starts in June and ends in September...

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.