ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending October 1st, 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 ..

Dogs have a form of sexually transmitted cancer that for 200 to 2,500 years has apparently spread via contagious tumor cells that escaped from their original body and now travel around the world as parasites.

These cells are the oldest cancers known to science thus far, and could shed light on how cancers survive and evade the immune system.

The researchers investigated canine transmissible venereal tumor, a cancer found in the domestic dog and potentially in relatives such as the gray wolf and coyote. It is spread through sex and licking, biting and sniffing cancerous areas. The tumors usually regress three to nine months after their appearance, leaving the dogs immune to reinfection, although providing enough time for dogs to pass the disease on.

Some human cancers, such as cervical cancer, are caused by viruses.

What is unique about this dog cancer is that, for 30 years, scientists have suggested it was caused by spreading the tumor cells themselves rather than a virus or other contagious agent. Prior research showed, for instance, the disease could not spread from tumor cell extracts or dead tumor cells, but only via living tumor cells. Still, virus-like particles seen in the tumor cells clouded the issue.

Cancer researcher Robin Weiss at University College London and his colleagues analyzed genetic markers in recently collected and archived tissue from dogs spanning five continents, from locales in Italy, India, Kenya, Brazil, the United States, Turkey and Spain. They found the tumor cells did not actually belong to the dogs they were in. Rather, the cells were all genetically nearly identical, apparently stemming from a wolf or a closely related ancient dog breed from China or Siberia.

The tumor cells themselves act as parasites, the new study concludes.

The researchers found the cancer secretes compounds that inhibit facets of the immune systems of their hosts, allowing them to avoid detection. At the same time, the immune inhibition they cause rarely results in death of the infected animal, to help guarantee the host passes the disease on.

Judging by the number of mutations the cancer's DNA accumulated, the researchers estimate it emerged 200 to 2,500 years ago...

Officials are recommending that nearly 1,000 Girl Scouts who may have been exposed to rabies at a Northern Virginia camp consider getting protective vaccinations.

There is only a small chance that any of the girls were infected by bats that were found in some of the sleeping shelters at Camp Potomac Woods, Loudoun County officials said.

But authorities are erring on the side of caution because around 1 percent of bats carry rabies, a viral disease that is incurable once symptoms appear. Bats can bite children in their sleep without waking them.

"We think the risk is extremely small, but we can't say there is no risk," Loudoun County Health Department Director David Goodfriend said. "Really, at the end of the day, it's the parents' decision of what level of risk they are willing to bear."

Last month, the mother of a girl who had attended the camp contacted the Girl Scout Council of the Nation's Capital. The girl had told her mother the shelter she slept in had bats living under the eaves.

Five bats subsequently caught at the camp's shelters tested negative for rabies. But officials soon learned that a few girls apparently touched a bat captured by a counselor, and..

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..