ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending August 30th, 2006

On the grounds of a military base an hour's drive from the capital, the Bush administration is building a massive biodefense laboratory unlike any seen since biological weapons were banned 34 years ago.

The heart of the lab is a cluster of sealed chambers built to contain the world's deadliest bacteria and viruses. There, scientists will spend their days simulating the unthinkable: bioterrorism attacks in the form of lethal anthrax spores rendered as wispy powders that can drift for miles on a summer breeze, or common viruses turned into deadly superbugs that ordinary drugs and vaccines cannot stop.

Managers of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center say it will explore the consequences of biological attacks, at times by simulating or creating small amounts of biological agents to study how to defend against them. Some research priorities suggested in government documents: * "Weaponized" pathogens: Microbes, such as anthrax spores, pictured above, that have been converted into a fine powder or other form that can be easily spread. * Novel delivery systems: Modern techniques and devices that can disperse viruses and bacteria over a wide area. * Genetically engineered threats: Pathogens that have been genetically altered to make them more virulent or harder to defeat.

The work at this new lab, at Fort Detrick, Md., could someday save thousands of lives -- or, some fear, create new risks and place the United States in violation of international treaties. In either case, much of what transpires at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) may never be publicly known, because the Bush administration intends to operate the facility largely in secret.

In an unusual arrangement, the building itself will be classified as highly restricted space, from the reception desk to the lab benches to the cages where animals are kept. Few federal facilities, including nuclear labs, operate with such stealth. It is this opacity that some arms-control experts say has become a defining characteristic of U.S. biodefense policy as carried out by the Department of Homeland Security, NBACC's creator...

It started as a self-sacrificing trip to Romania to perform missionary work at an orphanage.

But when a rural Indiana family returned home in 2005, the voyage ended in a horrible twist: Thirty-four people in the West Lafayette area came down with measles, a highly infectious disease brought home from Romania by the family's teenage daughter, who hadn't been vaccinated against it.

Although she wasn't feeling well, the girl attended a church function, where several unvaccinated members of the community became exposed to her germs. (Her family has asked that its name be withheld for privacy reasons.)

The family's story highlights a growing concern, according to a report published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Although vaccines are designed to protect those most vulnerable to infections ┠children ┠an increasing fear of vaccines could make more towns ripe for the spread of measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases, such as mumps and whooping cough, also known as pertussis.

Why do some people choose not to vaccinate their kids? In 1998, the Lancet, a British medical journal, published an article that claimed that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine caused autism in children. The article has since been retracted, but the worry has remained.

As a result, even though vaccines are required for school attendance, many parents have opted out, claiming that vaccination violates their personal or religious beliefs. It appears this view is especially prevalent among parents who home-school their children. And this, in turn, puts children and their communities at a growing risk of spreading preventable epidemics.

"Most parents today have never seen the physical and emotional devastation caused by vaccine-preventable diseases and have a skewed view of the perceived risks associated with vaccines versus the actual risks ..

UK drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline believes it has developed a vaccine for the H5N1 deadly strain of bird flu that may be capable of being mass produced by 2007.

The vaccine has proved effective at two doses of 3.8 micrograms during clinical trials in Belgium, BBC business editor Robert Peston has learned.

It is the size of the dose that is highly significant, Glaxo explained.

Firms want the smallest effective dose so that they can get the maximum number of shots out of a quantity of vaccine.

"It is good news that this vaccine can produce a significant response from a relatively small dose," said Dr Donald Cutler, principal lecturer in infectious diseases at University of East London.

Glaxo has yet to publish the results of its tests.

The news of the work on a potential vaccine came as Glaxo reported its profits had risen 14% in the three months to June to £1.32bn (US$2.4bn).

Glaxo said that governments could order the vaccine for delivery and stockpiling in early 2007. All being well, we expect to make regulatory filings for the vaccine in the coming months Glaxo chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier One of Glaxo's main rivals, the French drug company Sanofi Aventis, has also been working on a vaccine.

Drug companies are looking to develop treatments because of concerns that the H5N1 virus will combine with a human flu virus and mutate into a form which can spread between humans. But a number of firms, including Glaxo, are seeking to develop vaccines based on the existing H5N1 strains to give humans some form of protection.

Its vaccine is on a fast track for approval with the relevant licensing authorities - the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Evaluation Agency (EMEA).

"All being well, we expect to make regulatory filings for the vaccine in the coming months," said Glaxo chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier.

The UK and US have both indicated a desire to "prime" their respective populations with an initial inoculation ...

Avian flu tends to kill younger people, much as the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic did, the World Health Organization said Friday as it released an analysis of more than 200 cases.

Deaths from the disease surged in the winter for the last three years, the report said, so a rise in fatal cases can be expected late this year even if the virus does not mutate into a form more easily transmitted.

Moreover, the report warned, the risk of the virus becoming more transmissible remains high "because of the widespread distribution of the H5N1 virus in poultry and the continued exposure of humans."

The median age of victims with confirmed cases was 20 years, the report said. The highest death rate — 73 percent — was among patients ages 10 to 19, while the overall fatality rate was 56 percent. This pattern has been noted before, but the new analysis takes in more cases; the typical age is drifting downward.

A high death rate among young adults echoes the pattern found in the 1918-1919 epidemic, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Scientists contend that year's H1N1 virus was also an avian flu that mutated until it spread easily among humans; although it was fatal to only about 2 percent of those who caught it, that was enough to kill between 40 million and 100 million people worldwide.

When the second wave of the Spanish flu struck Boston in the fall of 1918, Dr. Osterholm said, the flu death rate among people ages 18 to 30, which had been about 30 per 100,000 people in previous years, soared to 5,700 per 100,000. (The figure was for civilians in Boston, he said, so it was not confounded by the high numbers of deaths in troop ships or trenches in Europe.)

The annual flu, by contrast, tends to kill the very young and the very old, often from secondary bacterial pneumonia.

In the Asian and Middle Eastern countries where the disease is most pervasive, people of all ages are exposed to chickens, but 90 percent of the cases have been in people under 40, so something in young adults must make them more susceptible.

Unpublished W.H.O. data from blood sampling around recent outbreaks, Dr. Osterholm noted, shows that few people carry antibodies to the virus, so there is not a huge pool of survivors of mild avian flu.

Evidence suggests that many young people in 1918 and quite a few in this outbreak are killed by a "cytokine storm" — the body's own immune reaction, which floods the lungs..

Spain has confirmed its first case of the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu.

The virus was detected in a great crested grebe that was found dead in the northern province of Alava, the agriculture ministry said.

The Spanish authorities said there was no reason for alarm, and that the case should not affect poultry consumption.

H5N1 has spread to birds in many European countries. The virus has killed more than 130 people since 2003 - mostly in East Asia.

Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said the case was "strictly veterinary" and would not affect people.

Migratory birds over the Straight of Gibraltar A key migratory route from Africa passes through Spain "I would like to make clear to citizens that there is no reason for alarm or for changing habits in our daily life," she said.

A sample from the bird, found in a marshes in Salburua lake near the city of Vitoria, was sent to a laboratory on Thursday.

Transporting domestic birds and hunting wild ones has been banned in an area 3km (2 miles) around the location where the wild bird was found, the agriculture ministry said.

Increased surveillance will take place within a 10km radius around the site.

Spanish officials had said last year that it was "only a matter of time" before avian flu spread to the country, which is on a key migration route of birds flying north from Africa...

Circumcising men routinely across Africa could prevent millions of deaths from AIDS, World Health Organization researchers and colleagues reported on Monday.

They analyzed data from trials that showed men who had been circumcised had a significantly lower risk of infection with the AIDS virus, and calculated that if all men were circumcised over the next 10 years, some two million new infections and around 300,000 deaths could be avoided.

Researchers believe circumcision helps cut infection risk because the foreskin is covered in cells the virus seems able to easily infect. The virus may also survive better in a warm, wet environment like that found beneath a foreskin.

So if men were circumcised, fewer would become infected and thus could not infect their female partners.

The human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, which causes AIDS, now infects close to 40 million people and has killed another 25 million. It mostly affects sub-Saharan Africa and the main mode of transmission is sex between a man and a woman.

Several studies have suggested that men who are circumcised have a lower rate of HIV infection. This has been especially noticeable in some parts of Africa, where some groups are routinely circumcised while neighboring groups ...

Multiple mutations have been found in the H5N1 bird flu virus that killed seven family members in Indonesia although scientists are unsure of their significance, a leading science journal said on Thursday.

But researchers believe the findings reinforce the need for bird flu data to be more widely available to improve understanding of the deadly virus.

"The functional significance of the mutations isn't clear -- most of them seem unimportant," the journal Nature said in a report in the latest issue on Thursday.

An analysis of virus samples from six of the eight members of the family showed 32 mutations accumulated as it spread, according to the confidential research obtained by Nature.

The analysis had been presented by virologist Malik Pereis of the University of Hong Kong at a closed meeting of animal and human health experts in Jakarta last month.

The first infected member of the family was a 37-year-old woman who probably caught the disease from poultry and then transmitted it to relatives before she died.

The World Health Organization (WHO), which has admitted that the cluster of cases was probably caused by human-to-human transmission, had said in May that there had been no significant mutations in the strain found the in family.

Nature said although the WHO statement was not incorrect, more could have been said about the changes that were found.

"One of the mutations confers resistance to the antiviral drug amantadine, a fact not mentioned in the WHO statement ...