ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

A ballooning world population, intensive farming practices and changes in sexual behavior have provided a breeding ground for an unprecedented number of emerging diseases, the U.N. health agency said Thursday.

AIDS and 38 other new pathogens are afflicting mankind that were unknown a generation ago, the World Health Organization said.

Though advances in science could account for the discovery of existing pathogens that were previously unidentified, WHO epidemics expert Dr. Mike Ryan said changes in human behavior and practices have produced more new diseases.

"We've seen a shift in trend that reflects a transition of human civilization," Ryan said. "The relationship to the animal kingdom, our travel, our social, sexual and other behaviors have changed the nature of our relationship with the microbial world and the result of that is the emergence of new pathogens and the spread of those pathogens around the world."

He noted that in the late 19th century, scientists discovered a range of agents causing ancient scourges such as anthrax, staphylococcus, tuberculosis and tetanus.

In the 1970s and 80s it wasn't pathogens experts were discovering but new syndromes: children getting sick with rashes and fever in the suburban areas of the Americas, people suffering from liver and renal disease after consuming undercooked meat.

"We've urbanized a world. We have moved people and food around that world at ever increasing speed," Ryan said. "We're not saying that's a bad thing. What we're saying is that we must recognize the risk we create in the process and invest to manage those risks."

WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said one of the changes affecting human health was increasingly intensive poultry farming, which may account for the global spread of bird flu.

"It should not come as a surprise that we are seeing more and more disease outbreaks coming from the animal sector," Chan said.

She said the majority of the 39 new diseases came from animals, including Ebola, SARS, and bird flu....

Dr. Susan Blank, a senior health department official for the city, is naturally wide-eyed in a bobbing your head, waving your hands kind of way. Her latest challenge is syphilis, which in the 1990s seemed headed for extinction but now, for unknown reasons, is surging back in New York City.

When asked if things happen in her field of sexually transmitted diseases that make her say "holy cow," her eyes widen to a you-gotta-be-kidding-me circumference.

There was the time, for example, when an investigator tracing the outbreak of a venereal disease asked an infected man the name, address and appearance of his most recent lover.

The man said he couldn't remember what his lover looked like. Pressed by the investigator about the utmost importance of the information, the man suddenly brightened and said he had a photograph of him.

The man produced a cellphone, called up a digital photo, and, with satisfaction, showed the investigator. It was a picture of genitalia.

When it comes to sex and disease, nothing human is alien to Dr. Blank, 46. At less than 5 feet tall and 95 pounds, Dr. Blank, who has blond Little Orphan Annie curls, is a dynamo comfortable with a startling vocabulary and equally startling field of investigation.

She used street lingo to describe the impotence that follows crystal-meth drug use and the change in male sexual position that such use sometimes prompts. Dr. Blank then stared at this reporter's tape recorder.

As assistant commissioner in the city;s Bureau of Sexually Transmitted Disease Control, she is confronting an old and new scourge in syphilis.

Earlier this month, the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported that in the first 13 weeks of 2007, cases of syphilis more than doubled to 260 from 128 in the same period a year ago. Nearly all - 250 - were among men, and many were found in Chelsea, a neighborhood popular with homosexual men.

In one early 1990s outbreak, syphilis appeared to be closely linked to the epidemic of crack cocaine.

The city conducted rapid syphilis screening tests at jails, prisons and juvenile detention facilities, Dr. Blank said. Carriers of syphilis also tended to carry human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Before the widespread use of antiretroviral drugs to treat AIDS, Dr. Blank said, those syphilis carriers may have died out. "But there is no absolute proof of that," she said....

An outbreak of cholera in two northern Iraqi provinces has killed eight people and infected 80 others, the Kurdistan Regional Government has said.

Kurdish Health Minister Zeryan Othman said local health authorities were also treating 4,250 suspected cases of the disease in Sulaimaniya and Tamim.

Specialist teams and emergency aid have been sent to the affected regions.

Serious problems with water quality and sewage treatment, worsened by crumbling local infrastructure, are being blamed.

A report by the UK-based charity, Oxfam, and the NGO Co-ordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI) last month warned that 70% of Iraq's population did not have adequate water supplies and that only 20% had access to effective sanitation.

Speaking after a visit to Azadi hospital in Kirkuk, Mr Othman said there were 47 confirmed cases of cholera in Tamim province and 35 in the neighbouring semi-autonomous Kurdish province of Sulaimaniya.

The minister said 2,350 people were also suffering from diarrhoea in Sulaimaniya and a further 2,000 in Tamim.

Mr Othman said the rate is about three times higher than the number recorded in the past three years.

He also warned that other areas could become affected, including the capital Baghdad and the central province of Salahuddin, where there have been some cases of the disease.

Specialist teams have been sent from Baghdad and emergency supplies flown in, he added.

Cholera is a bacterial infection which causes severe diarrhoea and vomiting...