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Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending November 27th, 2005

History is supposed to teach lessons. But past flu pandemics, it turns out, don't teach much about whether today's bird flu will become a human mega-killer or just make some scientists and officials look like Chicken Little.

In a viral sense, the sky has fallen three times in the last century ┠1918, 1957 and 1968 - when "super-flu" strains killed millions more people than annual flu epidemics routinely do.

Back then, there weren't surveillance systems or modern genetic tools to detect and document viruses as they evolved into killer strains. Because scientists don't know how that evolution happened or how long it took, they can't tell us whether what we're seeing with bird flu now is the run-up to a pandemic or a near miss.

"My crystal ball doesn't allow me to answer that," said Dr. Frederick Hayden, a University of Virginia flu expert.

Leading scientists now discount the notion that flu pandemics happen in regular intervals and that the world is overdue for a new one. They don't even agree on how bad it is that bird flu has spread to more types of birds. Instead of an appetite for people, the germ is showing a growing fondness for birds, some say...

Indonesia has had two more deaths from the H5N1 strain of bird flu confirmed by a laboratory in Hong Kong, bringing the total to seven in the country, the Health Ministry said on Thursday.

Hariadi Wibisono, a senior official from the ministry, said the tests were from a 20-year-old woman who died last weekend and a 16-year-old girl who died last week. Both victims, who died in Jakarta, had contact with dead chickens, he said.

"We received the test results this morning and both victims were positive for bird flu," Wibisono told Reuters.

He said that took total confirmed deaths to seven, with four positive cases where patients survived.

The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia, where it is known to have killed more than 60 people.

But experts fear H5N1 could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, just like human influenza. If it does, millions could die because they would have no immunity.

On Thursday, the Health Ministry said it would more than double to 100 the number of hospitals designated to treat bird flu patients across the world's fourth most populous country.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has made fighting bird flu one of the government's top priorities...

The World Health Organization confirmed two human cases of bird flu in China, including a female poultry worker who died from the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

China's Ministry of Health has confirmed three human cases -- two in central China's Hunan Province and one in east China's Anhui Province -- according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

But WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the organization does not have enough samples to confirm if a 12-year-old girl who died on October 17 contracted the virus, because she was cremated.

Thompson said the two confirmed cases include the girl's 9-year-old brother, who fell ill last month in Hunan but survived, and a 24-year-old female poultry worker in Anhui who died from the virus November 10.

China has reported 11 outbreaks in chickens and ducks nationwide over the past month, prompting authorities to destroy millions of birds in an effort to contain the virus. The government also announced an ambitious effort Tuesday to vaccinate the country's more than 14 billion farm birds.

Experts are especially worried about the potential for bird flu to spread and mutate in China because of its vast poultry flocks ..

Fungi native to East Africa could be used as a new tool in the fight against malaria, recent studies suggest. An international team of scientists from the Netherlands, Tanzania and the UK say their technique could significantly reduce malaria cases. Their research has been presented at the Fourth pan-African Malaria Conference in Yaounde, Cameroon.

When fungi infect certain insects, including malaria-carrying mosquitoes, they grow and quickly kill the animal. New studies show that a specific type of fungus native to East Africa can infect mosquitoes and reduce their lifespan by two-thirds - to just seven days.

Professor Willem Takken from Wageningn University in the Netherlands said the fungus also stops live mosquitoes from transmitting the malaria parasite to humans.

"The minute a mosquito becomes infected it basically stops its blood-feeding behaviour," he said.

"It seems as if it is no longer hungry. It will still take some water or any other juice but no longer blood.

"And secondly we find that mosquitoes that are infected with the fungus can no longer bring the malaria parasite to development." Studies carried out in Tanzania, where the researchers covered 20% of surfaces where mosquitoes rest with fungus-covered cotton sheets, led to a drop in malaria transmission of 76%...

Warmer, wetter weather brought on by global warming could increase outbreaks of the plague, which has killed millions down the ages and wiped out one third of Europe's population in the 14th century, academics said.

Migratory birds spreading avian flu from Asia today could also carry the plague bacteria westward from their source in Central Asia, Nils Stenseth, head of a three-day conference on the plague and how it spreads, told Reuters on Monday.

"Wetter, warmer weather conditions mean there are likely to be more of the bacteria around than normal and the chance of it spreading to humans is higher," he said.

The European Union-funded group has just finished analyzing Soviet-era data from Kazakhstan which show a link between warmer weather and outbreaks of the plague.

This analysis was important as it had not previously been clear whether warmer conditions encouraged the bacteria, fleas and rats to grow or killed them off, Stenseth said. Plague bacteria are often carried by fleas on rats.

"But if it becomes too hot it would kill off the fleas and rodents," he said. Many scientists say a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels is pushing up temperatures around the world and changing Earth's climate.

The plague -- caused by the virulent, aggressive and mutating Yersinia Pestis bacteria -- periodically breaks out in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries and has been carried around the globe by fleas on the back of rats, birds and in clothing for centuries...

Two companies are reporting rapid progress in developing a new vaccine designed to be safer than the standard one, and a third company, with no government support, is developing yet another new vaccine. That vaccine could offer significant advantages if terrorists were to unleash the smallpox germ in several cities at once, requiring the vaccination of huge numbers of people.

The government stumbled badly in its campaign after Sept. 11, 2001, to vaccinate health care workers who would respond to a smallpox attack. It has since spent millions to fund development of a new, safer vaccine and has already decided to order enough to protect at least 10 million people. It could buy far more if money becomes available.

Progress on safer vaccines is a success for U.S. policymakers, but it also confronts them with vexing new questions about which vaccines to buy, how many doses to buy, whether to resume a failed program to inoculate some people in advance of an attack and how to deploy the vaccines rapidly if smallpox is unleashed by terrorists.

The government is preparing to tackle the strategic questions over the next few months. "Right at the present moment, we're setting up a committee to really look at this with a very hard eye," said D.A. Henderson, a Baltimore doctor who advises the government and who is often called the world's premier expert on smallpox. "There are major changes that have occurred that force us to reexamine what we're going to do."

After the terrorist and anthrax attacks of late 2001, concern about the unrelated smallpox virus reached a fever pitch...

Most of us do not ordinarily consider our lives to be at stake in matters of public policy. The prospect of an avian flu pandemic, however, puts us all in jeopardy, and if the dilatory response of the Bush administration proves fatal in this case as it did after August 2001, when the president was told that Osama bin Laden was about to strike within the United States yet did nothing, or in the years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, when engineers repeatedly warned that the levees in New Orleans were inadequate, we will pay an even greater price for our slothful, ideologically driven, and crony-ridden national leadership than in either of the epochal disasters that have so far befallen America in the Bush years.

Scientific concern about avian flu did not just emerge recently, though one might have thought so from the flurry of administration activity this past month. Nor is the concern about a pandemic solely the result of the appearance of the H5N1 virus and the high mortality rate among the small number of known cases. Flu pandemics are a recurrent historical phenomenon. The concern about flu is not like the anxiety about killer asteroids, which, it is true, have struck before -- millions of years ago. The flu pandemic that took 50 million to 100 million lives worldwide in 1918 was followed by lesser pandemics in 1957 and 1968. Scientists have told us for years that it was not a question of if but when another flu pandemic would strike.

Yet, in recent years, the United States allowed itself to become totally dependent on foreign manufacture of flu vaccine -- sources that would be grossly inadequate, in both quantity and speed of production, in the event of a pandemic...