ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

An eastern Kentucky school district with one confirmed case of antibiotic-resistant staph infection plans to shut down all 23 of its schools Monday, affecting about 10,300 students, to disinfect the facilities.

The project will involve disinfecting classrooms, restrooms, cafeterias, hallways, locker rooms, buses and even external areas such as playgrounds and sports fields, said Roger Wagner, superintendent of Pike County schools.

"We're not closing schools because there's been a large number of breakouts, but as a preventive measure," Wagner said.

One Pike County student was diagnosed with in September with MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The bacterial strain can be treated with other antibiotics, but without treatment it can be deadly.

The bacteria was blamed for the death of a 17-year-old Virginia high school senior and a 12-year-old New York City middle school student this month.

At least seven students on New York's Long Island were recently diagnosed with MRSA, as were 10 members of an athletic team at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York.

However, a government report has estimated it may sicken more than 90,000 Americans each year.

Two weeks ago, students staged a sit-in at the lunch room of Pike Central High School in effort to get school officials to clean the school as protection against the bacteria.

Most abandoned the sit-in after Principal David Rowe threatened them with a three-day suspension, but 33 stayed and were given the choice of one day of in-school suspension or two days out-of-school suspension....

The strain of the HIV virus which predominates in the United States and Europe has been traced back to Haiti by an international team of scientists.

The strain passed from Haiti to the US in about 1969 before spreading further, says the team in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences.

They hope knowing this could help find a cure for HIV, which can lead to Aids.

"HIV-1 group M subtype B" predominates in the US, Europe, large parts of South America, Australia and Japan.

Now scientists say they know where it came from.

The team examined archived blood samples from five early Aids patients - all of them Haitian immigrants to the United States - and analysed genetic sequences from another 117 Aids patients from around the world.

With this data, they recreated a family tree for the virus, which they believe shows conclusively that the strain came to the US via Haiti - probably via a single person - in around 1969.

Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson is one of the study's authors. He says the new research suggests HIV first arrived in Haiti in the mid-1960s - probably from Africa where HIV is thought to have originated - before making its crossing into the US.

"By 1966 the virus first starts spreading in Haiti," he told the BBC.

"A few years later one variant from Haiti gives rise to what would then light the fuse and explode around the world as the Aids pandemic that we first became aware of."

Prof Worobey and his colleagues now want to trace the strain back further. His suspicion is that it probably arrived in Haiti from the Congo via Haitians who were working in Africa during those years....

Deployed military troops, emergency workers, pregnant women and children will be among the first to get scarce vaccinations if a pandemic strain of flu breaks out, U.S. officials said.

A long-awaited report to be issued on Tuesday lays out who would be first in line to get vaccinated against H5N1 bird flu or any other strain of pandemic influenza.

The Health and Human Services report proposes creating four categories of people, and vaccinating the top tier of each category first. The categories are homeland and national security, critical infrastructure, health and community support services and the general population.

"Certain military personnel like deployed forces would get vaccinated before certain other military personnel," HHS science adviser William Raub said in a telephone interview.

Virtually all health experts agree that the world is overdue for a pandemic of some sort of influenza.

No one can predict when one might come, how bad it would be or which strain of influenza virus may be responsible. But the H5N1 bird flu virus that has infected 331 people since 2003, killing 203 of them, is the current chief candidate.

Companies are working to make a vaccine against H5N1 but the process takes months and it is not clear if vaccines formulated to match the current strain would protect well against whatever mutated version emerges to cause a pandemic.

"We won't be able to start making a true vaccine against the actual pandemic virus until that virus appears, until we have samples," Raub said. Continued......

An Indonesian toddler died from bird flu after coming into contact with dead poultry, a senior health ministry official said Wednesday, pushing the country's death toll to 89.

The four-year-old girl from Tangerang on the western outskirts of the capital, Jakarta died on Monday after hospitalized for two days, said Nyoman Kandun.

"Tests from two local laboratories came back positive," he said.

The girl first showed bird flu like symptoms on Oct. 13, said Kandun adding that health investigators concluded she had contact with dead poultry in her neighborhood.

Indonesia has been the country hardest-hit by the virus since it began ravaging poultry stocks across Asia in 2003.

Indonesia's human death toll from the illness now accounts for almost half of the recorded 203 fatalities worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The girl was the fourth Indonesian killed by the disease this month. A 21-year-old man, a 44-year-old woman and a 12-year-old boy died earlier.

Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country and home to millions of backyard chickens, is considered a potential location for a major bird flu outbreak.

The disease remains hard for people to catch -- most cases have so far been traced to contact with infected birds -- but experts fear it could mutate into a form that spreads easily between humans, potentially sparking a global pandemic....

The world’s most promising malaria vaccine has been shown to work in infants less than a year old, the most vulnerable group, according to a study being published today.

The study, published in the Lancet, was small, involving only 214 babies in Mozambique, and was intended to show only that the vaccine was safe at such young ages. But it also indicated that the risk of catching malaria was reduced by 65 percent after the full course of three injections.

“We’re now a step closer to the realization of a vaccine that can protect African infants,” said Dr. Pedro Alonso, a professor at the University of Barcelona who leads clinical trials of the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine.

If it passes much larger clinical trials due to start in 7 countries next year and is accepted by national regulatory agencies, it could be ready for distribution by 2012, said Dr. W. Ripley Ballou, Glaxo’s vice president for international clinical trials.

In 2004, Dr. Alonso showed for the first time that the vaccine could protect children against infection or death. That study of 2,022 children aged 1 to 4 showed protection from infection about 45 percent of the time.

Such a relatively low level of protection would not be acceptable in a vaccine in the West, but malaria is a leading killer of African children, so even imperfect coverage is a major public health victory.

The vaccine, presently known as RTS,S and tentatively brand-named Mosquirix, is made by fusing a bit of outer protein of the deadly falciparum strain of the malaria parasite with a bit of hepatitis B virus and a chemical booster — the latter two added to provoke a stronger immune reaction.

At least 9 malaria vaccine candidates are in development, but Mosquirix is the farthest along. Glaxo has been refining it for 20 years, and expects to have spent up to $600 million on it by the time it comes to market. About $100 million has been paid by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

No decision has yet been made about the price to be offered to poor countries and international health agencies. But “if a child will benefit, price will not stand in the way,” said Dr. Christian Loucq, director of the vaccine initiative.

The vaccine is given in three injected doses. ...