ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending January 27th, 2007

The Ebola virus has killed from 3,500 to 5,500 gorillas in one region of the Congo Republic since 2002, and its continued spread, along with hunting, could wipe out the species, researchers are reporting today.

"A lot of animals are dying," said Dr. Peter D. Walsh, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary primatology in Leipzig, and an author of a report being published today in the journal Science. "There's a massive decline."

Several vaccines have been developed that work in animals in the lab, including monkeys, and Dr. Walsh is eager to test them on gorillas in the wild by injecting the animals with darts or putting an oral vaccine in food. By tracking the spread of the virus and vaccinating animals in its path, it might be possible to stop outbreaks, he said.

Other researchers say that although vaccination might be feasible, it is not known whether the vaccine could made into a heat-stable version or an oral form. In addition, there would be miles of red tape to cut through, involving various conservation groups, donors and governments.

Dr. Stuart Nichol, chief of molecular biology in the Special Pathogens Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said: "It's really going to be a nightmare to try to press forward with some kind of vaccine approach. On the other hand, it doesn't feel good to sit back and do nothing. But in reality it's going to be exceedingly difficult to do anything."

The authors of the report have been studying western gorillas - a distinct species from eastern gorillas - since 1995 in the Lossi Sanctuary in the northwestern Congo Republic, near Gabon. In 2002, following human disease outbreaks caused by the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus, the researchers began finding dead gorillas. Over a number of months they found 33, tested 12 for Ebola and found that 9 were infected. And from October 2002 to January 2003, 130 of the 143 gorillas they had been studying - 91 percent - simply disappeared. The losses continued: 91 of 95 gorillas the researchers were watching died ..

South Korea plans to kill cats and dogs to try to prevent the spread of bird flu after an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 virus at a chicken farm last week, officials said Monday.

Animal health experts, however, suggested it was a "bit of an extreme measure" when there was no scientific evidence to suggest that cats or dogs could pass the virus to humans.

Quarantine officials have already killed 125,000 chickens within a 1,650-foot radius of the outbreak site in Iksan, about 155 miles south of Seoul, the Agriculture Ministry said. Officials began slaughtering poultry on Sunday, a day after they confirmed that the outbreak was caused by the H5N1 strain...

If terrorists ever unleashed a biological weapon, unusual molecules normally found in the blood of llamas could quickly help warn of the attack, scientists now report. Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and their colleagues experimented with antibodies , which act as the red flags and magic bullets of the body's personal defense arsenal.

Every antibody is a complex protein tailored to clamp onto a specific target. Immune cells in the blood and lymph use antibodies either to identify enemies for attacks or to directly bind to and neutralize intruders.

Scientists now regularly develop antibodies for use in medicines against cancers and other diseases or in sensors to warn of dangerous microbes and chemicals.

Unfortunately, the antibodies currently used irreversibly break down at high temperatures, often limiting extended use in the field.

Biochemist Ellen Goldman at the Naval Research Laboratory with virologist Andrew Hayhurst at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research and their colleagues investigated llama antibodies.

Past studies revealed that the binding regions of these antibodies and those from camels and sharks are unusually small, just one-tenth the size of common human antibodies.

Llama, camel and shark antibodies consist just of chains of heavy proteins, missing the additional lighter protein chains that more complicated antibodies from other species use.

Their relative simplicity makes them more durable, capable of withstanding temperatures of almost 200 degrees Fahrenheit...

Scientists descending more than 2 miles into the hot, fractured rocks of a South African gold mine have discovered clans of microbes that have thrived there in total isolation for millions of years.

Their quest, the scientists say, reveals more clearly than ever how life can exist in the most extreme environments imaginable: beneath the surface of Mars, perhaps, or on almost any other planet in the galaxy.

The ancient bacteria exist in an environment that scientists describe as by far the most outlandish for any organisms ever found -- they are long removed from life-giving sunlight and living only on sulfate minerals and hydrogen split from water by uranium's radioactivity.

Teams of other researchers have long found "extremophile" microbes in the boiling geysers of Yellowstone National Park, on erupting volcanoes in rifts on the ocean floor, in the high desert of the Andes, in acidic springs and polar ice caps -- but the bacteria beat them all for their extreme lifestyle.

The organisms were discovered and identified by a broad group of researchers reporting today in the journal Science. The researchers include geologists from Princeton, Taiwan and Indiana; geneticists at Berkeley and Walnut Creek; and others in Nevada, Canada and Germany.

The microbes, found by the geologists during nearly 10 years of exploration, are among a large class of well-known surface bacteria called Firmicutes. Scientists at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek recently sequenced the genes of many in the community of microbes found in the cave, including one wormlike bacterium they have identified as the newly named Desulforudis audaxviator.

"These bugs come from a formation at least 3 million and probably tens of millions of years old..

Scientists have discovered a new strain of bird flu that appears to sidestep current vaccines. It's infecting people as well as poultry in Asia, and some researchers fear its evolution may have been steered by the vaccination programs designed to protect poultry from earlier types of the H5N1 flu.

The discovery by Yi Guan of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues is reported in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new variant has become the primary version of the bird flu in several provinces of China and has spread to Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia and Thailand, the researchers report. It is being called H5N1 Fujian-like, to distinguish it from earlier Hong Kong and Vietnam variants.

"We don't know what is driving this," report co-author Dr. Robert G. Webster of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., said in a telephone interview.

New vaccines will have to be developed, Webster said.

Many scientists are going to think the vaccination program encouraged the virus to evolve resistance, he added, but high-quality vaccines can reduce the level of illness and prevent emergence of variants.

While the new virus has infected people, there is no evidence that it can pass easily from person to person, Webster said.

However, he added, "this virus is continuing to drift."

Dr. Michael L. Perdue, of the World Health Organization's Global Influenza Program in Zurich, Switzerland, said the new variant doesn't indicate any increased risk for people "other than the fact it seems to be pretty widespread."..

n December 2001, as the investigation into the U.S. anthrax attacks was gathering steam, coalition soldiers in Afghanistan uncovered what appeared to be an important clue: a trail of documents chronicling an attempt by al-Qaeda to create its own anthrax weapon.

The documents told of a singular mission by a scientist named Abdur Rauf, an obscure, middle-aged Pakistani with alleged al-Qaeda sympathies and an advanced degree in microbiology.

Documents seized by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2001 included letters from a Pakistani scientist to al-Qaeda's No. 2 commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The scientist, identified by U.S. and Pakistani officials as Abdur Rauf, traveled through Europe in search of anthrax spores and bioweapons equipment. The result of his work for al-Qaeda remains unclear.

Using his membership in a prestigious scientific organization to gain access, Rauf traveled through Europe on a quest, officials say, to obtain both anthrax spores and the equipment needed to turn them into highly lethal biological weapons. He reported directly to al-Qaeda's No. 2 commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and in one document he appeared to signal a breakthrough.

"I successfully achieved the targets," he wrote cryptically to Zawahiri in a note in 1999. Precisely what Rauf achieved may never be known with certainty. That's because U.S. officials remain stymied in their nearly five-year quest to bring charges against a man who they say admitted serving as a top consultant to al-Qaeda on anthrax -- a claim that makes him one of a handful of people linked publicly to the group's effort to wage biological warfare against Western targets.

Rauf, 47, has been under scrutiny in Pakistan since he was detained there for questioning in late 2001, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials who agreed to talk about the case for the first time. But officially he remains free, and Pakistan now says it has no grounds for arrest. Last year, in an acknowledgment of the impasse in its four-year joint investigation with Pakistan, the FBI officially put the case on inactive status.

"We will never close the door, but the chances of getting him into the United States are slim to none..