ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending April 23rd, 2006

Emergency plans to tackle widespread food shortages in the event of a bird flu pandemic are being drawn up by ministers, according to secret Cabinet documents.

Off-duty firemen and retired lorry drivers would be pressed into service to ensure that essential food and drink supplies were delivered. Laws that restrict the daily hours of drivers and other vital workers would be suspended.

The confidential papers - seen by the Sunday Telegraph - show that a serious lack of long-distance- HGV drivers willing to go to infected areas is seen in Whitehall as a potential "pinch point" if avian flu takes a grip. The papers reveal government concern over a lack of preparation for a pandemic among the biggest food firms.

They also show how, in the event of a serious outbreak overseas, the Government will give preventive medicine to embassy and consular staff - but not to British holidaymakers or UK nationals who live in an infected country.

The Government fears that any pandemic could last more than six months. The documents say that Whitehall should be on alert for a pandemic on an "extended time-scale - certainly for six months - and perhaps longer". They also suggest "more than one pandemic wave" of bird flu.

The documents were drawn up on March 22, a fortnight before a dead swan in a village in Fife was found to have the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease. The swan, which was washed ashore in the village of Cellardyke, had a strain similar to that contracted by 100 birds in Germany. Tests are continuing on hundreds of other dead birds, but none - apart from the swan - has tested positive for H5N1. Fourteen other birds that gave rise to concern tested negative.

The documents show a lack of preparedness in Whitehall that ministers and officials are working round the clock to combat. Their disclosure ...

A mumps epidemic is sweeping across Iowa in the nation's biggest outbreak in at least 17 years, baffling health officials and worrying parents.

As of Thursday, 245 confirmed, probable or suspected cases of mumps had been reported to the Iowa Department of Public Health since mid-January.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is the nation's only outbreak, which the CDC defines as five or more cases in a concentrated area.

"We are calling this an epidemic," said Iowa state epidemiologist Dr. Patricia Quinlisk, explaining that mumps has spread to more than one-third of the state and does not appear to be confined to certain age groups or other sectors of the population.

Quinlisk said Iowa has had about five cases of mumps a year in recent years, and this is the first large outbreak in nearly 20 years.

"We're trying to figure out why is it happening, why is it happening in Iowa and why is it happening right now. We don't know," she said.

CDC spokeswoman Lola Russell said the federal agency has no answers yet. But Quinlisk said one theory is that the infection was brought over from England - perhaps by a college student - because the strain seen in Iowa has been identified by the CDC as the same one that has caused tens of thousands of cases of the mumps in a major outbreak in Britain over the past two years.

"It may have been a college student, since we did see the first activities on college campuses, but we can't prove that," Quinlisk said. The Public Health Department said 23 percent of the 245 reported patients are in college.

The CDC said it is the nation's biggest epidemic of mumps since...

The A(H5N1) influenza strain circulating the globe now may never seriously threaten humans, but for another subset of the earth's living creatures, it is already a disaster.

"If you're a chicken," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a recent conference on avian flu, "this is a pandemic. We have to be aware that other species are thinking about this differently."

By some estimates, more than 200 million domestic chickens, ducks and geese have already either died of the disease or been killed on the order of public health authorities to prevent its spread.

But scientists are scratching their heads over how much of a threat the virus presents to the world's birds.

All birds are thought to be susceptible, said P. Patrick Leahy, acting director of the United States Geological Survey, which tracks wild bird movements in the country. The survey's National Wildlife Health Center lists all the 87 species from which infected birds have been found in Asia, Africa and Europe. The species include sparrows, eagles and flamingoes. But in most cases, it has been a dead bird here and a dead bird there.

While the virus can race through a chicken farm, killing tens of thousands of birds in a few days, there have been very few die-offs of large numbers of wild birds in any one spot. Nor have ornithologists who net live birds along international flyways and take samples from birds shot by hunters found many infections.

And bird experts cannot yet point to any species they think is likely to become extinct.

"As a conservationist, I'm not concerned about it wiping out whole populations," said Colin Poole, director of the Asia program for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo and others. "I'd say the biggest threat is things like Russian politicians saying people should go to the borders and shoot migrating birds. There's plenty of that kind of nonsense going around."

In May 2005, Chinese researchers reported that 6,000 dead birds had been found in Qinghai Lake nature reserve, among them many bar-headed geese (Anser indicus). In theory, that could mean that 5 percent to 10 percent of the world's population of bar-headed geese was wiped out...

No more wild birds have tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu since a case was confirmed in a swan found in Fife last week. However experts are continuing to test birds picked up near Cellardyke, and a UK helpline has taken thousands of calls about dead birds.

Two newspapers have published details of government plans to cope with a human flu pandemic, devised last year.

But a health spokesman said: "This is still a disease of birds, not humans."

Extra vets and support staff have been drafted into eastern Scotland to help recover other dead birds.

Dr John McCauley, of the Institute of Animal Health, told BBC Radio Five Live it was vital to continue the testing.

He said 1,100 samples of dead birds had been analysed in laboratories in Weybridge, Surrey, in the last two months and only one had proved positive.

"But one is a whole lot worse than zero. Although the intensity of infection may not be that great, we do have to be very, very vigilant and do everything in our powers to stop the virus getting into the poultry," he said.

Nearly 2,500 dead birds were reported across the UK on Friday.

Scotland's eight laboratories that can test for bird flu have remained open this weekend and will stay open over Easter.

More than a dozen birds have been put down by vets at Jersey's Animals Shelter after a duck found in a car park showed signs of bird flu..

A new form of tuberculosis that is highly resistant to drugs and nearly impossible to treat has been rapidly emerging world-wide, presenting challenges to public-health officials' efforts to bring the infectious lung disease under control, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The federal public-health agency also said that the number of people in the U.S. infected with another form of TB -- one that is resistant only to the two most commonly used drugs and is known as multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR-TB -- is rising after generally declining for more than a decade, reflecting the growing global epidemic of drug-resistant TB.

In a survey of 25 tuberculosis laboratories on six continents, the Atlanta agency and the World Health Organization found that 2% of patient samples tested between 2000 and 2004 were resistant not only to the two most commonly used TB drugs, but also to most of the medications that are considered the second line of defense against the disease. This new form of the disease, known as extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, is of great concern to public-health officials because it is virtually untreatable with available drugs, leaving patients to "preantibiotic" era methods, such as removal of part of the lung, said Kenneth Castro, assistant surgeon general and director of the CDC's division of tuberculosis elimination.

XDR-TB rose from 5% of MDR-TB cases in 2000 to 6.5% of MDR-TB cases in 2004, and was found most commonly in South Korea, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, according to the CDC survey. There also have been cases in the U.S.

The new super-resistant TB is spreading at a time when officials are already struggling to ..

Two groups of researchers, in Japan and in Holland, say they have discovered why the avian flu virus is rarely if ever transmitted from one person to another.

The reason, the researchers propose, is that the cells bearing the type of receptor the avian virus is known to favor are clustered in the deepest branches of the human respiratory tract, keeping it from spreading by coughs and sneezes. Human flu viruses typically infect cells in the upper respiratory tract.

The avian virus would need to accumulate many mutations in its genetic material before it could become a pandemic strain, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin.

According to a University of Wisconsin news release approved by Dr. Kawaoka, "The finding suggests that scientists and public health agencies worldwide may have more time to prepare for an eventual pandemic."

Dr. Kawaoka's finding is published in today's issue of Nature, and a similar finding, by Thijs Kuiken and colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, appears in this week's Science.

Flu experts already knew that people who contract the current avian flu virus, a type known as A(H5N1) or H5 for short, are infected in the lower lung.

Paul A. Offit, a virologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the new reports helped explain why the H5 virus, though it can infect people, does not easily spread from one person to another.

Virologists agree that a flu pandemic will happen sooner or later as one of the 16 types of flu virus in the animal world, probably one that infects birds, will manage to switch hosts, and grow and spread in humans. But they differ over whether H5 is the likeliest candidate to make such a switch. Previous pandemics have been caused only by H1- (the 1918 pandemic), H2..

Cabinet secretaries participated in a drill Saturday that simulated a smallpox attack as the government tested plans to counter the potential use of bioweapons by terrorists.

"The purpose of this exercise, which was only a drill, was to address the federal government's response to a potential smallpox attack," said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. "While there's concern, we do not have any concern that a smallpox attack is imminent."

The World Health Organization reported the disease was eradicated in 1980. Still, there are fears that smallpox could be used by terrorists as a biological weapon.

The United States ended routine childhood vaccination against smallpox in 1971. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, however, the Bush administration ordered some military personnel vaccinated and recommended shots for front-line health care workers.

The government has stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine for everyone in the U.S., Perino said. The government also has helped develop a new vaccine, which is in clinical trials, that does not appear to have the same potential negative side effects as the earlier one, she said.

In 2004, President Bush signed an order directing government agencies to help protect the country from an attack with biological agents. A revised version had 59 instructions for agencies to improve the nation's defenses, including improving the Biowatch system of sensors that continuously monitor and analyze the air in 31 cities.

Officials from various government agencies, including Centers of Disease Control Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, participated in the four-hour exercise to identify gaps in local and state preparedness plans and fine-tune the federal government's response.

Members of the Cabinet who participated ...