ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending February 12th, 2006

DAVOS, Switzerland - The global threat that most preoccupies the world's business leaders is the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, according to a study released Thursday at the World Economic Forum.

Other global risks, such as terrorist attacks and the possibility of an even bigger oil price shock, were deemed just as dangerous, but less likely to happen in the coming year, said the Global Risks 2006 report.

The H5N1 bird flu strain has ravaged poultry stocks in Asia since 2003 and recently spread to Europe through migratory birds. World health authorities fear the disease could mutate into a form that spreads easily from person-to-person, sparking a flu pandemic that could kill millions of people. So far, though, human cases of the disease have been mostly limited to people who have come into direct contact with infected birds. According to the World Health Organization, 83 people have died of the disease since 2003.

If the avian flu H5N1 virus mutates to enable human-to-human transmission, it may disrupt our global society and economy in an unprecedented way,❠said the 22-page risk study, which was released by a panel of companies and experts.

Death tolls could be on the level of the 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed between 40 million ...

Antibodies derived from chimpanzees may help treat smallpox and the potentially deadly side effects caused by the existing vaccine, US scientists say. Natural smallpox is thought to have been eradicated but there are fears it could be used as a biological weapon.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that lab tests suggest the new treatment can be used in cases where instant protection is needed. Rodent tests showed it could also treat vaccine complications, the report adds. Potent antibodies can provide instant protection after exposure to the virus

The World Health Assembly declared the world free of naturally occurring smallpox in May 1980 after a highly effective campaign to eradicate the deadly disease. Since then, there has not been a single case.

However, there is concern that the virus could be used as a devastating biological weapon in a terrorist attack.

The UK government has a stockpile of 40m doses of the current smallpox vaccine - which works well but can trigger severe side effects - for use in the event of such an attack.

The smallpox virus causes symptoms such as headache, delirium and vomiting, followed the development of a trademark rash. It kills approximately one in three of those infected.

The current vaccine blocks infection by the smallpox virus variola by targeting it with another virus, vaccinia.

However, vaccinia in turn can trigger severe side effects in a small minority of people...

The United Nations is looking for some professional assassins. There is a world of chickens out there that need killing, and it must be done neatly - and humanely.

Iranian veterinary officials buried suffocated birds along the border with Turkey this month. With migratory birds spreading avian flu, the disease is popping up from Asia to Turkey and from Siberia to the Equator, often in spots that are isolated, rural and unprepared.

Many governments, veterinary specialists say, know little about killing millions of animals - especially when the aim is to spill as little blood as possible and to dispose of the bodies so they cannot spread the highly contagious virus to birds or humans.

Problems are cropping up everywhere. In Vietnam, for example, home flocks range free across muddy rice paddies, where chasing them is next to impossible. High water tables mean they cannot be buried, and poor local farmers cannot spare the gasoline or wood to incinerate them.

In villages from China to Turkey, cullers wearing biohazard suits recruit barefoot children to catch chickens for them. Older children kick dying turkeys around like footballs or play with severed heads. Farmers hide prize roosters or bribe cullers to spare their flocks. Chickens are buried alive or burned alive.

"We need an international culling task force, a reliably robust, incorruptible public service to go around killing chickens," said Dr. David Nabarro, special representative for avian flu for the United Nations secretary general...

More similarities have been found between the bird flu creeping into Eastern Europe and the 1918 Spanish flu that decimated populations worldwide, including the discovery of an entirely new way bird flu may kill human cells.

Researchers from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., have found that bird flu viruses carry a gene that can latch onto many crucial proteins inside human cells, presumably disrupting their function and causing far more severe disease than human viruses.

The research provides a new hypothesis for why certain bird flu viruses are particularly lethal for humans.

Published in today's issue of the journal Science, the research comes as Canada prepares to release an updated pandemic flu plan that includes new infection control and border measures, from strategies to get people to wash their hands and cough into Kleenex, to surveillance systems in airports and emergency rooms to detect the virus's introduction into Canada. There's no evidence so far that the H5N1 avian flu is transforming into the next human pandemic flu strain, but "we certainly are really increasing our efforts in terms of preparedness," says Dr. Theresa Tam, of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

But a SARS survivor, and infectious disease specialist, says Canada is "nowhere close" to being ready for a pandemic should it happen. Dr. Allison McGeer, of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, says more money and time needs to be spent on looking for new drugs for influenza, which masks will truly protect people, how sick people will be cared for when there aren't enough health-care workers and getting Canadians to agree on "fair and reasonable" distribution of vaccines. In what is being described as the first large-scale mapping of bird flu viruses, researchers from St. Jude mapped 2,196 bird flu genes culled from ducks, gulls, shorebirds and poultry samples collected over 30 years, looking for patterns and comparing them to human flu bugs...

Athens fell because a plague swept the empire. But scientists have debated what illness was responsible. A new DNA analysis of teeth from an ancient Greek burial pit indicates typhoid fever caused the epidemic.

The plague began in Ethiopia and passed through Egypt and Libya to Greece in 430-426 B.C. It changed the balance of power between Athens and Sparta, ending the Golden Age of Pericles and Athenian dominance in the ancient world.

An estimated one-third of Athenians died, including Pericles, their leader.

Knowledge of the epidemic had come largely from an account by the Greek historian Thucydides, who was taken ill with the plague but recovered. Despite Thucydides description, researchers could only narrow the possibilities down to a range that included the bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax and measles.

The new study, led by Manolis Papagrigorakis of the University of Athens, found DNA sequences similar to those of the modern day Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, the organism that causes typhoid fever. The work is detailed online by the International Journal of Infectious Diseases...

Legions of tiny blood-sucking bugs are munching their way through the Big Apple, making this the city that never sleeps ... tight. Bedbugs are back, and they're not just rearing their rust-colored heads in New York City. Authorities say it's a global crisis: Exterminators who handled one or two bedbug calls a year are now getting that many in a week, according to the National Pest Management Association.

"There's an epidemic going on throughout the country, and New York seems to be the hotbed," said Jeffrey Eisenberg, a pest control expert.

The elusive critters avoid light and attack in the middle of the night. About the size of an apple seed, a bedbug hides among cracks and crevices in furniture and walls, and can disappear into the edge of a picture frame or between buttons on an alarm clock.

They invade even the cleanest apartments and swankiest neighborhoods, including Manhattan's Upper West Side, where a city councilwoman is calling for a citywide bedbug task force.

"We've always had pests in New York City - we have rats, cockroaches, etcetera, but bedbugs are new," said Councilwoman Gail Brewer. "We're not doing a good job focusing on it."

The pests are efficient and active travelers, often hitching a ride on people's clothing and jumping from host to host when people brush up against each on the subway, in elevators or on crowded streets.

Bedbugs are turning up in hospitals, schools, movie theaters, health clubs. Recent reports put them in a a New Jersey college dorm and a Los Angeles hotel - where one guest filed a $5 million lawsuit. A New Yorker and his landlord wound up in court over an infestation in his Lower East Side apartment, where he fruitlessly tried everything to get rid of the relentless buggers...

LONDON, England (AP) -- There is a "very high" probability that a terrorist group will strike using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said in comments published Tuesday.

"I rate the probability of terror groups using (weapons of mass destruction) as very high," U.S. State Department counterterrorism coordinator Henry Crumpton was quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph newspaper. "It is simply a question of time."

Crumpton said a biological attack was potentially the most troubling scenario. He said evidence from Afghanistan suggested al-Qaeda had been seeking to develop anthrax before the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001.

"It is not just the nuclear threat that bothers me," he was quoted as saying. "I think, if anything, the biological threat is going to grow."

"As catastrophic as a nuclear attack would be, it would be self-contained. But if you look at a worst-case scenario for a biological attack, it would be difficult to determine whether or not it was a terrorist attack, and it would be far more difficult ...