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Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending February 20th, 2007

The virus that caused the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic which killed more people than World War One was so deadly because it triggered an uncontrolled immune system response in its victims, scientists said on Wednesday.

About 50 million people died in the 1918 pandemic, the worst in modern history, but why it was so lethal has been a mystery.

By infecting macaque monkeys with a reconstructed version of the 1918 virus, an international team of researchers uncovered a clue about the virus which could help to reduce the impact of future influenza pandemics.

They found the virus replicated quickly and unleashed an excessive immune system response in the macaques that destroyed the lungs in a matter of days.

"Instead of protecting the individuals that were infected with the high pathogenic virus, the immune response is actually contributing to the lethality of the virus," said Professor Michael Katze, of the University of Washington in Seattle, in a telephone briefing.

Katze and his colleagues believe the unusual immune system reaction increased the virulence of the virus in the macaques and in the victims of the Spanish flu pandemic.

"It is very important for us to understand why the virus was so lethal and that is why we did this research," said Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka who headed the research team.

The scientists said their findings, which are reported in the journal Nature, suggest early interventions targeting the immune system response against infection could help to limit the number of deaths that could be caused by future pandemics...

An Icelandic cod enzyme might be the cure for bird flu, a recent experiment, which the Icelandic company Ensmtaekni hf. took part in, indicates. In five minutes, the isolated fish enzyme killed 99 percent of H5N1 viruses.

The killer enzyme, called penzim, was extracted from the intestines of cod by Ens­mtaekni and is currently being developed for beauty products and various types of medicine. The experiment on the H5N1 virus was conducted in London. Frattabladid reports.

CEO of Ens­mtaekni and biochemist Jan Bragi Bjarnason said he is very excited about the results of the bird flu experiment.

"People have feared that the bird flu virus will change into a human flu virus and now we have a likely cure in case that happens..

he flu virus that killed roughly 50 million people worldwide in 1918 is alive and still very deadly. New research sheds light on how the 1918 Spanish flu virus might have killed so many people so quickly — and opens new horizons for researchers who hope to avoid a flu pandemic today.

Scientists regenerated the 1918 virus Jurassic-Park-like from a frozen corpse two years ago. Now scientists have discovered that the regenerated virus can kill monkeys much as it killed humans in 1918, by kicking the immune system into dangerous overdrive, which ultimately kills the infected host.

A group of researchers infected one group of monkeys with the 1918 virus, and one group of monkeys with a conventional human flu virus — called the K173 virus. Within 24 hours, each of the 1918-virus-infected animals became visibly ill, according to the study report. The report is published in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The monkeys were depressed, the study authors report, and didn't want to eat or drink. They coughed, sniffled and were euthanized within eight days of infection because their symptoms were so severe.

Monkeys infected with the K173 virus didn't show serious signs of a flu infection. Those animals were also euthanized within eight days of infection.

When doing autopsies of the 1918 flu and K173 infected monkeys, scientists could see to what extent the 1918 flu virus had ravaged the monkeys it infected...

An Indonesian hospital was on Monday overwhelmed with patients suffering bird flu symptoms while the virus spread further among flocks in Vietnam and flared anew in Thailand.

A recent spurt of human infections with the H5N1 bird flu virus, which re-emerged in Asia in late 2003, has alarmed health officials.

Four Indonesians have died this year after a six-week lull in cases, taking the number of people killed by bird flu in the country to 61, the highest in the world.

At Jakarta's Persahabatan hospital, where doctors were treating 9 people with bird flu symptoms, including a 5-year-old girl in intensive care, its isolation wards were overwhelmed.

"If we get more patients, we will send them to Sulianti Saroso," Muchtar Ichsan, the head of the bird flu ward, told Reuters, referring the country's main bird flu treatment centre in North Jakarta.

The patients included the son and husband of a woman who died of bird flu last week. The 18-year-old son has been confirmed to have the disease, although tests so far on the husband show he does not have the virus.

In a bid to stem the spread of the virus, Indonesia plans to prohibit people from keeping backyard fowl in three high-risk provinces.

Adding to regional worries, a senior Thai agriculture official said on Monday that 1,900 ducks had been culled in the northern province of Phitsanulok after some of the birds had tested positive for H5N1.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that could spread easily between people, but there has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus so far in the latest cases.

The World Health Organisation says bird flu has infected 267 people and killed 161 of them since 2003.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says the spike in cases in the northern hemisphere winter follows a similar pattern to that seen over the past three years and was to be expected...

A flu virus as deadly as the one that caused the 1918 Spanish flu could kill as many as 81 million worldwide if it struck today, a new study estimates. By applying historical death rates to modern population data, the researchers calculated a death toll of 51 million to 81 million, with a median estimate of 62 million.

That's surprisingly high, said lead researcher Chris Murray of Harvard University. He did the analysis, in part, because he thought prior claims of 50 million deaths were wildly inflated.

"We expected to end up with a number between 15 and 20 million," Murray said. "It turns out we were wrong."

The new work is published in Saturday's issue of the journal The Lancet.

The 1918 flu outbreak killed at least 40 million people worldwide. But flu pandemics have varied widely in their severity. The most recent, in 1957 and 1968, were relatively mild, killing 2 million and 1 million people worldwide respectively.

To get their estimates, Murray and his colleagues examined all available death registration data from 1914 to 1923. There was sufficient information from 27 countries, including numbers from 24 U.S. states and nine provinces in India.

The researchers compared death rates during the pandemic to average death rates before and after. That revealed how much the pandemic flu contributed to death rates, a figure called excess mortality. They then applied the excess mortality data to worldwide population data from 2004.

If their median estimate of 62 million flu deaths occurred in a single year, the total number of deaths from all causes worldwide would more than double, jumping by 114 percent.

One surprise in the new study was the huge variation in how different countries would be affected by a pandemic. The study estimates that 96 percent of the deaths would occur in the developing world..

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 ..