ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending May 10th, 2006

President Bush is expected to approve soon a national pandemic influenza response plan that identifies more than 300 specific tasks for federal agencies, including determining which frontline workers should be the first vaccinated and expanding Internet capacity to handle what would probably be a flood of people working from their home computers.

The Treasury Department is poised to sign agreements with other nations to produce currency if U.S. mints cannot operate. The Pentagon, anticipating difficulties acquiring supplies from the Far East, is considering stockpiling millions of latex gloves. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has developed a drive-through medical exam to quickly assess patients who suspect they have been infected.

The document is the first attempt to spell out in some detail how the government would detect and respond to an outbreak, and continue functioning through what could be an 18-month crisis, which in a worst-case scenario could kill 1.9 million Americans. Bush was briefed on a draft of the implementation plan on March 17. He is expected to approve the plan within the week, but it continues to evolve, said several administration officials who have been working on it.

Still reeling from the ineffectual response to Hurricane Katrina, the White House is eager to show it could manage the medical, security and economic fallout of a major outbreak. In response to questions posed to several federal agencies, White House officials offered a briefing on the near-final version of its 240-page plan. When it is issued, officials intend to announce several vaccine manufacturing contracts to jump-start an industry that has declined in the past few decades.

The background briefing and on-the-record interviews with experts in and out of government reveal that some agencies are far along in preparing for a deadly outbreak. Others have yet to resolve basic questions, such as who is designated an essential employee and how the agency would cope if that person were out of commission.

"Most of the federal government right now is as ill-prepared as any part of society," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Osterholm said the administration has made progress but is nowhere near prepared for what he compared to a worldwide "12- to 18-month blizzard...

Two vans of undercover police inspectors pulled up at a storefront in Milan in March, their target neither terrorists nor drugs.

Picking their way through a refrigerator at the back of a Chinese grocery store off a piazza, the agents found their quarry: bags of duck feet.

This followed a similar raid at a Milan warehouse a few months ago that yielded three million packages of chicken meat smuggled from China.

There is increasing evidence that a thriving international trade in smuggled poultry ┠including live birds, chicks and meat ┠is helping spread bird flu, experts say.

Poultry smuggling is a huge business that poses a unique threat: The (A)H5N1 bird flu virus is robust enough to survive not just in live birds but also in frozen meat, feathers, bones and even on cages, though it dies with cooking.

"No one knows the real numbers, but they are large," said Timothy E. Moore, director of federal projects at the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center at Kansas State University.

"Behind illegal drug traffic, illegal animals are No. 2," he said. "And there is no doubt in my mind that this will play a prominent role in the spread of this disease. It looks to be the main way it is spreading in some parts of the world," along with the migration of wild birds.

Particularly when smuggled live, poultry can easily pass the disease on to birds in other countries. Though the risk of transmission in, say, infected frozen duck feet in a restaurant is minimal, poultry parts can also spread the disease to birds when used as raw feed or in fertilizer

Tests have confirmed that a six-year-old dairy cow in the Canadian province of British Columbia suffered from mad cow disease, the government said on Sunday.

The pure-bred Holstein is Canada's fifth native-born case of the brain-wasting bovine spongiform encephalopathy disease, but the animal did not enter the human food chain, Canada's Food Inspection Agency said.

"This finding does not affect the safety of Canadian beef," the agency said in a press release, repeating a statement it made when the suspected case in the Fraser Valley region near Vancouver was first announced last week.

"No part of this animal entered the human food or animal feed systems," the agency said.

The United States said on Sunday it will now send inspectors to Canada, but U.S. agriculture officials downplayed the impact of the discovery on the trade in live cattle.

"Based on the information currently available, I do not anticipate a change in the status of our trade," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

The cow was discovered as part of testing on cattle considered susceptible of having contracted BSE, and Canadian officials have repeatedly said they expect additional cases would be discovered.

CFIA has detailed records on the cow's history from birth..

A woman was hospitalized earlier this month with bubonic plague, the first confirmed human case in Los Angeles County in more than two decades, health officials said Tuesday.

The woman, who was not identified, was admitted April 13 with a fever, swollen lymph nodes and other symptoms. A blood test confirmed she had contracted the bacterial disease. The woman was placed on antibiotics and is in stable condition, officials said.

Bubonic plague is not contagious, but if left untreated it can morph into pneumonic plague, which can be spread from person to person. Bubonic plague is usually transmitted to humans from the bites of fleas infected by dead rodents.

Health officials suspect the woman was exposed to fleas in her central Los Angeles home, said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county's director of public health. The woman's family was also placed on antibiotics as a precaution, but there's no evidence they were infected.

The case is unusual because it occurred in an urban area, Fielding said. Most bubonic plague outbreaks happen in rural communities.

Health officials said there was no cause for panic because the disease is not easily transmissible.

"There's no cause for alarm in the community," Fielding said.

Health officials went to the woman's home Monday to trap squirrels and other wild animals. Blood samples from the animals will be sent to a lab to determine if any are infected.

An estimated 10 to 20 Americans contract plague each year, mostly in rural communities. About one in seven cases is fatal, according to federal statistics.

The last human cases of plague in Los Angeles County occurred in 1984 when three people contracted the disease. Two of those cases were travel-related and the third involved a person exposed to a sick animal. All three survived.

Bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe between 1346 and 1351. The last major urban outbreak in the U.S. occurred in Los Angeles in 1924-25, when at least...

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 ..