Archive for the “Pestilence” Category
Source: CNN.com
Many people think of tuberculosis as being a disease from the past. The truth is far from it: Tuberculosis is mutating into dangerous new strains for which there is no known cure.
One of the most frightening strains is XDR-TB, which stands for extensively drug-resistant TB.
Unlike less virulent strains, XDR-TB does not respond to the antibiotics that are usually used to treat TB. The disease is virtually incurable and threatens to become a pandemic.
About 40,000 new cases of XDR-TB emerge every year, the World Health Organization estimates.
Award-winning photojournalist James Nachtwey, who has chronicled the death and devastation the disease is bringing to many countries around the world, describes XDR-TB as “a merciless, man-eating predator lurking in the shadows.”
He warns: “If it’s not contained, the consequences could be dire.”
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Technorati Tags: tuberculosis, XDR-TB
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Avian influenza, or bird flu, is a major concern for public health authorities and is an increasing threat to public health. Dr. David Henderson, deputy director for clinical care of the NIH Clinical Center, discusses what bird flu is, how it spreads, and where we can look for possible treatment and prevention. Presented October 18, 2005 as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medicine for the Public lecture, and now part of the reference library for FluLab’s online planning tools. Lecture program distributed by FluLab, founding sponsor of the International Bird Flu Summit, Washington, DC.
Technorati Tags: Avian Influenza
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Source: washingtonpost.com
The Department of Homeland Security dedicated a massive biodefense laboratory in Frederick yesterday, moving toward the facility’s opening despite questions raised about the risks of deadly pathogens to be studied there.
When the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center at Fort Detrick is fully operational in March, about 150 scientists in the lab will be tasked with protecting the country from a bioterrorist attack through prevention or containment. Another goal is to allow investigators to fingerprint biological agents such as viruses and bacteria, quickly tracing their source and catching the offender.
But critics cite the case of Bruce E. Ivins, a researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, also at Fort Detrick, as evidence that such installations might help bioterrorists get access to lethal agents. FBI investigators think Ivins, who committed suicide in July, was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Construction began in June 2006 on the $143 million, 160,000-square-foot facility inside the fort, the Army’s sprawling medical research post in Frederick. The ship-shaped building will be divided between the lab’s major divisions: a forensic testing center, which aims to identify the culprits in biological attacks; and the Biothreat Characterization Center, which seeks to predict what such attacks will look like and guide the development of countermeasures.
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Technorati Tags: National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center
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Emphasis added, see the bold parts…and do not rely on the Gov’t to do the preparation and planning for you, because for the Gov’t and corporations the worst impact of an pandemic is economic, and has nothing to do with the health and welfare of individuals or families.
Source: La Crosse Tribune
 Ready or not, a flu pandemic is coming, says Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gerberding talked about preparing for the pandemic threat at a national conference Thursday at Logistics Health in La Crosse. No one knows when the pandemic is coming or what strain of flu virus will cause it, but it is overdue, she said.
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She said CDC scientists have created a potential vaccine in case the virus develops into a pandemic strain and are conducting more research to develop a vaccine. They have recreated the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic to better understand it.
Gerberding said organizations and corporations need to come up with preparedness plans and confront the impact of a flu pandemic. Some people believe a pandemic won’t happen, while others feel too overwhelmed to do anything, she said.
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The CDC is building 18 global disease detection and response centers around the world, Gerberding said.
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Osterholm, director of the infectious disease center at the University of Minnesota, said the death rate from the next pandemic could exceed 300 million.
Critical products and services including food, water and basic drugs won’t get to people due to transportation and energy problems in a pandemic, he said. Global supply chains may be severely challenged, he said.
“No one has addressed the food system yet,” Osterholm said.
Logistics Health, the Coulee Region Public Health Consortium and the La Crosse Medical Health Science Consortium sponsored the conference. More than 150 business and organization personnel attended in person, and another 1,200 people watched the Webcast. A majority of the Fortune 500 corporations were represented.
Tommy Thompson, the former Wisconsin governor who is now president of Logistics Health, hired Gerberding and Osterholm when he was secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services.
“Planning is important for survival,” Thompson said.
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Source: The Hindu
 A combination of advances in biotechnology and easy access to inputs has heightened the threat of bio-attacks, David Heyman, an international expert on bioterrorism, said here on Thursday.
In an interview with The Hindu, Mr. Heyman, Director and Senior Fellow, Homeland Security Program, at the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), described the anthrax attacks in the U.S. [in 2001], and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in the Asia Pacific region [in 2003] as “two wakeup calls” for the threats posed by bio-attacks. “Those two things said we have got to be concerned about disease, and the possibility of it being used for harmful purposes.”
The former was restricted to the U.S., but had international repercussions: “On every continent, in every country practically, there were hoaxes and fears that required the governments’ attention — law enforcement and/or public health authorities who had to run down to see if they were real.”
Although SARS “happened primarily in Asia, and North America, all the world had to be concerned because of the speed of travel, everyone becomes a carrier.”
Access to bio-weapons was evident from recent attacks such as the chemical warfare in Iraq, and the polonium assassination in London.
“What you can get your hands on, and do some damage is certainly within the realm of possibility now, and the realm of existence.”
The difficulties in tracing a bio-attack posed another problem. “Unlike nuclear or even explosive attacks, bio is unique in that whether you are a state actor, or a non-state actor, it is very hard to trace.” And, “You leave very few footprints when preparing for a bio-attack.”
The technology needed for a bio-attack, Mr. Heyman, who is a former senior adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, said, “has become more and more available to private citizens and small groups,” as they were getting “smaller, faster and cheaper.” In the last 20 years, the technology had evolved “as rapidly and as effectively as computers have, almost in parallel, if not more so.” This trend was mainly driven by the race for the Human Genome Project, and the application of biotechnology to pharmaceuticals and life sciences. The main technologies used for bio-engineering were now “basically the equivalent of desktop capability” and were available off the shelf or over the counter, as they were dual-use in nature. Striking a note of caution, he said: “Where technology is available and intent is there; harm can be done.”
Mr. Heyman, however, entered a caveat on bio-attacks by non-state actors. “It’s still hard to do. You need to be technologically-versed. Access to technology and material doesn’t mean that you can actually successfully achieve bio-weapons. In fact, bio-weapons are much harder to do than explosives.”
Drawing a parallel with the recent Gujarat serial blasts, he said: “These were technologically simple explosives; bio-weapons are much more complicated and to get that right, we have to get a lot of other things right, so it is still hard to do.”
Mr. Heyman, who prepared a report on the working of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) continued to pose the most concern, as it was the “preferred weapon of choice for terrorists.” Over 55 per cent of all terrorist attacks involve IEDs, next are probably gun attacks, he pointed out.
Major lesson
The major lesson from the recent bombings in India was that “States cooperate and the Central government does not necessarily force that to happen.”
The Ahmedabad-attacks case, he said, was cracked because there was inter-State cooperation between the domestic security and intelligence agencies.
Referring to the trans-State dynamics of the serial bombing, he said: “That’s the way terrorists operate, that’s the way they operate within the state, within a country and now within the world. We have to take trans-border actions. Terrorists take advantage of bureaucracies. They are going to hide in the seams of society and that’s what they do best and we who seek to protect society have got to break down those barriers between states, between governments and that’s true internationally.”
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Get it at: Wikileaks
On the risk of Avian Pandemic Influenza (Avian/Bird Flu) negotiations at the World Health Organisation (WHO)
There’s not enough flu vaccine to go around in the event of a pandemic. If it happens, you can bet that the rich will be vaccinated, and the poor will suffer…. and that multinational drug companies will make a fortune. Remember Tamiflu?
Ever since Indonesia began withholding flu viruses from the WHO to protest the injustices of the system, governments have been trying to renegotiate the terms of international flu virus sharing. Although Indonesia, African countries, and others in Asia and Latin America have put detailed proposals on the table, wealthy countries are staunchly resisting making any major concessions to make the system more fair.
This text, drafted by the Australian chair of the WHO negotiating group, purports to be a balanced take on various countries proposals; but it’s not. It’s more like business as usual. Under the scheme put forward by Australia, developing countries would continue to be ripped off, and continue to submit their viruses to WHO “for global public health”, only to see those viruses claimed by multinational companies and put into products too expensive for them to afford.
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Indeed, please err on the side of caution when it comes to this issue of cancer and cell phone usage. It’s better to be safe than sorry. The only phone we have is a cell phone, but we have used less than 75 minutes on it since March.
Source: The Associated Press
The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.
The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don’t find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Herberman is basing his alarm on early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science and he believes people should take action now — especially when it comes to children.
“Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn’t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” Herberman said.
No other major academic cancer research institutions have sounded such an alarm about cell phone use. But Herberman’s advice is sure to raise concern among many cell phone users and especially parents.
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Source: The Independent
The world is failing to guard against the inevitable spread of a devastating flu pandemic which could kill 50 million people and wreak massive disruption around the globe, the Government has warned.
In evidence to a House of Lords committee, ministers said that early warning systems for spotting emerging diseases were “poorly co-ordinated” and lacked “vision” and “clarity”. They said that more needed to be done to improve detection and surveillance for potential pandemics and called for urgent improvement in rapid-response strategies.
The Government’s evidence appeared in a highly critical report from the Lords Intergovernmental Organisations Committee, which attacked the World Health Organisation (WHO) as “dysfunctional” and criticised the international response to the threat of an outbreak of disease which could sweep across the globe.
The Government said: “While there has not been a pandemic since 1968, another one is inevitable.” Ministers said it would could kill between two and 50 million people worldwide and that such an outbreak would leave up to 75,000 people dead in Britain and cause “massive” disruption.
Peers joined ministers calling for urgent action to build up early warning systems across the Third World that can identify and neutralise outbreaks of potentially deadly new strains of disease before they are swept across the globe by modern trade and travel. Peers also called for new action to monitor animal diseases, warning of the potentially disastrous effects of conditions such as the H5N1 bird flu virus jumping to humans and demanded that Britain step up funding for the WHO to tackle the threat.
With international tourist journeys now reaching 800 million a year, giving unprecedented potential for epidemics to spread across borders, and many cities rapidly growing in developing countries, which would provide “fertile ground” to spread disease, peers on the committee warned that conditions such as Sars, avian influenza and ebola “have the potential to cause rapid and devastating sickness and death across much of the world if they are not detected and checked in time”.
Their report said: “We have been warned that an influenza pandemic is overdue and that when – rather than if – it comes the effects could be devastating, particularly if the strain of the virus should be of the H5N1 variety that has been seen in south-east Asia in recent years.
“While much progress has been made in the past 10 years in improving global surveillance and response systems, much remains to be done if we are to detect new strains of the virus and counter them before they have had the chance to spread.”
Read the full article: The Independent
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Source: ajc.com
A critical germ lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost power last week because the agency had taken two backup generators out of service for upgrades, CDC officials said Friday.
Their absence from a complex, centralized backup generator system created a power fluctuation when the system was activated during a July 11 power outage, causing the whole system to shut down, CDC spokesman Dave Daigle said. The problem is being fixed, he said.
The backup power failure — the second in 13 months — is the type predicted years ago by some CDC engineers. And it has heightened concerns in Congress about lab safety at the Atlanta agency, which experiments on smallpox, Ebola, anthrax and other deadly germs.
“For high containment labs, repeated power failures are repeated safety failures,” said U.S. Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has been investigating biolab safety nationally.
“Fortunately, there were no adverse consequences this time,” Dingell (D-Mich.) said Friday. “However, the fact that these incidents continue to occur raises serious concerns about the future and highlights the fact that CDC must act now to address problems in its system.”
Last week’s incident began when a bird shorted out a Georgia Power transformer about 5:40 p.m., cutting off power to part of the CDC’s main campus on Clifton Road. The agency’s backup generation system initially came on, but quickly shut down, and power remained off for one hour and 15 minutes at four agency buildings.
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From: Herbal Household Remedies
A newly discovered and highly lethal virus strain begins with symptoms similar to that of a cold but can quickly lead to severe respiratory crisis.
“This virus has the capability of causing severe respiratory illness in people of all ages, regardless of their medical condition,” said John Su, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The virus was discovered by infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert, who noticed that otherwise healthy patients were being stricken by pneumonia so severe that they would die without oxygen treatment. The dangerous symptoms developed within only one or two days of initial cough and fever symptoms.
Since Gilbert’s discovery of the virus in Portland, Oregon, outbreaks have been identified at military bases in Washington, Texas and South Carolina.
The disease is a variety of adenovirus, the family that includes 51 infectious agents responsible for diseases such as colds, pink eye, bronchitis and the stomach flu. A mutation has apparently occurred in a virus called adenovirus 14, making it much more lethal. In the first outbreak examined by Gilbert, seven of 30 hospitalized patients died.
“That’s an incredibly high mortality rate,” Gilbert said.
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