ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending March 1st, 2006

Police in Japan have raided two firms on suspicion of illegally selling equipment to North Korea that could be used to make biological weapons. The Tokyo companies are suspected of exporting freeze dryers which could cultivate germs used in such weapons.

The two unnamed companies were reported to have sent their exports to North Korea via Taiwan.

On Monday another company was raided on suspicion of exporting equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

The two companies targeted in Friday's raids allegedly shipped the dryers to North Korea in September 2002.

The companies are suspected of infringing the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law, under which exporters need to apply for a government licence before selling such items abroad, the Kyodo news agency reports.

Mitutoyo Corp, the company raided on Monday, is alleged to have sold precision measuring equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons to China and Thailand in 2001 and 2002 without permission.

Similar equipment produced by Mitutoyo was found in Libya, Kyodo news said...

New infectious diseases are now emerging at an exceptional rate, scientists have told a leading conference in St Louis, US.

Humans are accumulating new pathogens at a rate of one per year, they said.

This meant that agencies and governments would have to work harder than ever before to keep on top of the threat, one expert told the BBC.

Most of these new infectious diseases, such as avian influenza and HIV/Aids, are coming from other animals.

"This accumulation of new pathogens has been going on for millennia - this is how we acquired TB, malaria, smallpox," said Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University Of Edinburgh, UK. "But at the moment, this accumulation does seem to be happening very fast.

We're going to have to run as fast as we can to stay in the same place Prof Mark Woolhouse, University Of Edinburgh "So it seems there is something special about modern times - these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population."

Professor Woolhouse has catalogued more than 1,400 different agents of disease in humans; and every year, scientists are discovering one or two new ones.

Some may have been around for a long time and have only just come to light. Others that have emerged recently are entirely new, such as HIV; the virus that causes Sars, and the agent of vCJD. The difference today, say researchers, is the way humans are interacting with animals in their environment.

Changes in land use through, for example, deforestation can bring humans into contact with new pathogens; and, likewise, agricultural changes, such as the use of exotic livestock.

Other important drivers include global travel, global trade ..

India began a door-to-door search for people with fever on Monday, quarantining six people in hospital as authorities scrambled to contain the country's first outbreak of bird flu.

In Europe, officials urged people to carry on eating poultry meat despite outbreaks of the lethal H5N1 bird flu strain, saying European Union authorities had the means available to wipe out the disease.

A string of EU countries have now confirmed H5N1 in wild birds, knocking consumer confidence in poultry meat -- especially chicken.

"We have the measures and legislation for containment and eradication of such diseases," EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou told a news conference in Brussels.

In Germany, Tornado reconnaissance warplanes and soldiers in biohazard suits were deployed to prevent the spread of bird flu after H5N1 reached the mainland.

Sixty soldiers clad in disease protection suits and gas masks disinfected vehicles on the Baltic island of Ruegen where the virus was found in swans.

At least 11 countries have reported bird flu outbreaks over the past three weeks, an indication that the virus, which has killed at least 91 people, is spreading faster.

India's health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, said the situation was "under control" and there were no human cases of avian flu in the country despite fears at the weekend that a farmer had succumbed to the disease.

Officials in the remote district of Nandurbar in western Maharashtra state launched a door-to-door check for people with fever, and continued a mass cull of up to half a million birds.

Six people, including three young children, with flu-like symptoms were hospitalized on Monday, joining a woman and a child who were placed in an isolation ward the previous day.

"Eight people are in isolation. We are keeping our fingers crossed," federal health secretary P.K. Hota told a news conference in New Delhi...

The first reports of bird flu that cropped up in recent days in widely separated countries - India, Egypt and France - highlighted the disease's accelerating spread to new territories.

International health experts have been predicting widespread dissemination of the disease for about half a year, since they concluded that it could be spread by migrating birds. But the recent acceleration has perplexed many experts, who had watched the A(H5N1) virus stick to its native ground in Asia for nearly five years.

The most alarming of the current outbreaks, if only for sheer size, were the two widely separated episodes of avian flu in India, one of which has killed 50,000 birds in poultry flocks in the last few days. The Indian government, which has long been on alert for the virus because that country is on many migration paths in Asia, began killing half a million birds in the hopes of quashing the outbreaks, officials announced Sunday.

But the most perplexing report involved the single case in France - a wild duck found dead in the suburbs of Lyon - because migratory birds from Asia that carry the virus do not normally travel there at this time of year.

"After several years in one place, why is it now moving so rapidly?" asked Dr. Samuel Jutzi, director of the Animal Production and Health Division at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "There is a lot about this that we just don't know."

The dead duck in France, he said, was "very odd, very difficult to explain." But he added, "What is known is that the width of flyways are very broad, and there may have been a swarm that went farther westward than normal."

In Western Europe, the disease has been confined to wild migratory birds, and authorities across the Continent were taking severe measures ...

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...