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Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

It wasn't that long ago that if your child got a staph infection, it was knocked out with a couple of doses of penicillin. Now, penicillin may not work because there’s a form of staph called "MRSA" that has mutated and become resistant to most antibiotics.

As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it's a superbug that used to strike exclusively hospital and nursing home patients. Three years ago, 60 Minutes reported on a then-relatively new community-based MRSA that attacks perfectly healthy people who had not set foot in a hospital.

That's what we're seeing more and more of. New government data estimate that about 2,000 people are dying of community-based MRSA every year. But with the deaths of five school children this year, parents are understandably frantic and want to know what causes it, and how to protect against it. Problem is: there aren't many answers.

Mt. Lebanon High School in Pennsylvania has been hit hard: 13 members of its football team, the Blue Devils, came down with MRSA infections this year.

Alex Birks and Glenn Isralsky, tight ends on the varsity squad, say the school was spooked.

"I was a little scared. The guy in the locker next to me had it -- a few down. So, I mean, I was takin' my stuff home every night, washin' it, takin' showers all the time," Glenn tells Stahl. "I didn't want to get it. I actually had it sophomore year and I did not want to get it again. So."

"I didn't have a bad case of it. But, I had it," he says.

The first sign was on his elbow after a game in which he'd cut himself on the school’s AstroTurf field. "It starts, it looks nothing more than a pimple. And in a day or two, it can become a huge growth on your skin," Glenn explains.

When diagnosed at this stage, before it gets into the bloodstream, MRSA is usually mild, and easily treated with general-purpose antibiotics, like Bactrim. And kids are told to bandage the sore.

Alex says his parents do look over him. "I'll be sittin' at dinner and my dad will just look up as my mom looks over and says, 'What is that? Lift up your arm.' You know?" he explains.

Both Glenn and Alex admit they're pretty neurotic about MRSA....

About 5,000 birds are being slaughtered after avian flu was confirmed in turkeys on a Suffolk farm, government officials have announced.

The H5 strain was found in turkeys at Redgrave Park Farm near Diss. All birds on the farm, which include ducks and geese, are to be slaughtered.

A 3km protection zone and a 10km surveillance zone have been set up.

The government could not yet confirm if the birds had the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, a spokeswoman said.

Police officers have been seen at the entrance to the farm, and vehicles are being sprayed with a jet hose.

Obviously this is another huge blow to the farming industry, which is still dealing with the effects of bluetongue and foot and mouth

National Farmers' Union president

A statement issued by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said that preliminary tests showed the turkeys had the H5 strain of bird flu. It is not yet known whether it is H5N1, which has killed some 200 people worthwhile.

All birds are being slaughtered at the premises, and Defra said it was consulting on what further measures may be needed.

It is expected that all the birds will be gassed and then put in sealed containers, officials said.

Inside the zones, bird movements will be restricted and all birds must be housed or isolated from contact with wild birds.

All poultry keepers on the British poultry register will be notified and EU officials have been informed.

Geoffrey Buchanan, operations director of Redgrave Poultry, which rents the farm, said that all employees at the site had been given antiviral drugs as a precaution.

He added that all the birds on the site were now indoors, and that he hoped this would be a contained outbreak.

National Farmers' Union president Peter Kendall said: "Obviously this is another huge blow to the farming industry, which is still dealing with the effects of bluetongue and foot-and mouth."

Acting Chief Veterinary Officer Fred Landeg said that laboratory results on what type of bird flu it was were expected "in the next 24 hours".

Defra officials said that 10% of birds in one shed died over one night. ...

The aggressive antibiotic-resistant staph infection responsible for thousands of recent illnesses undermines the body's defenses by causing germ-fighting cells to explode, researchers reported Sunday. Experts say the findings may help lead to better treatments.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a form of the very common staph family of germs.

An estimated 90,000 people in the United States fall ill each year from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. It is not clear how many die from the infection; one estimate put it at more than 18,000 per year, which would be slightly higher than the rate of U.S. deaths from AIDS.

The infection long has been associated with health care facilities, where it attacks people with reduced immune systems. But many recent cases involve an aggressive strain, community-associated MRSA, or CA-MRSA. It can cause severe infections and even death in otherwise healthy people outside of health care settings.

The CA-MRSA strain secretes a kind of peptide -- a compound formed by amino acids -- that causes immune cells called neutrophils to burst, eliminating a main defense against infection, according to researchers.

The findings, from a team of U.S. and German researchers led by Michael Otto of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared in Sunday's online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

While only 14 percent of serious MRSA infections are the community associated kind, they have drawn attention in recent months with a spate of reports in schools, including the death of a 17-year-old Virginia high school student.

Both hospital-associated and community-associated MRSA contained genes for the peptides. But their production was much higher in the CA-MRSA, the researchers said.

The compounds first cause inflammation, drawing the immune cells to the site of the infection, and then destroy those cells.

The research was conducted in mice and with human blood in laboratory tests.

Within five minutes of exposure to the peptides from CA-MRSA, human neutrophils showed flattening and signs of damage to their membrane, researchers said. After 60 minutes, many cells had disintegrated completely.

"This elegant work helps reveal the complex strategy that S. aureus has developed to evade our normal immune defenses," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID director, said in a statement. "Understanding what makes the infections caused by these new strains so severe and developing new drugs to treat them are urgent public health priorities."...

A hospital in Arkansas has isolated its entire intensive care unit and isn't admitting new patients due to the outbreak of a potentially deadly drug-resistant bacterial infection, FOXNews.com has confirmed.

All ICU patients at St. Joseph's Mercy Health Center in Hot Springs, Ark., have been isolated and forced to remain in the unit, said Dr. Vineet Chopra, director of the hospital's medicine program and the chair of the infection control committee.

The multi-drug-resistant bacteria known as acinetobacter has affected six critically ill patients so far, four of them in intensive care and the other two in the general medical population, Chopra said.

The six patients were infected by the organism and have been receiving intravenous antibiotics as treatment, according to Chopra. So far, he said, they're "responding well."

It is not known how the patients were exposed to the pathogen acinetobacter.

The strain bears similarities to so-called "staph" infections but is unrelated, according to Chopra. It tends to afflict very sick people, can be fatal and is the third most common bacterial infection in hospital ICUs.

"It's not a super bug," Chopra said. "It's got absolutely no relation to staph. But it is a dangerous bacteria."

Though the infection wasn't caused by the more common methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus bacteria that leads to staph outbreaks, this acinetobacter strain shows similar drug resistance and, like staph, is "present in the environment — and present everywhere," Chopra explained.

"The difference between this and staph is that this tends to attack individuals only when they are very sick," he said. "It can start from any pore opening and can cause skin wounds, soft tissue wounds and pneumonia. It can be very serious."

As with staph, acinetobacter can also lead to sepsis, a dramatic immunity response by the body causing fever as high as 101 degrees Fahrenheit, an elevated heart rate and low blood pressure,...

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...