SuperStrain Biosecurity Blog

Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, Precursor to AIDS is at least 32,000 years old

2010-09-21T09:31:00.001Z

Why did it jump to humans only in the last few decades? Two competing theories.

Various Regions of Canada and the United States Prepare for West Nile Virus as Mosquito Season Arrives

2010-06-15T11:12:00.002Z

Saskatchewan, Okanagan Country and Colorado governments gear up and issue warnings against the mosquito borne West Nile Virus.

Doctor who first advocated MMR Vaccine - Autism link has his name struck off the medical register in the UK

2010-05-24T11:41:00.002Z

The General Medical Council of the UK ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who first came up with the theory that the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine was a cause of autism in children, was guilty of serious professional misconduct in the way he carried out his research

Southern Utah Mosquitos Carrying West Nile Virus

2010-05-13T12:27:00.003Z

A side effect of global warming is the spread of insect borne tropical diseases to the temperate zones. Southwest Utah Public Health Department confirmed yesterday the discovery of the presence of the West Nile Virus in a sample of mosquitoes from the region. The West Nile virus causes the debilitating West Nile Fever, similar to Dengue Fever and West Nile encephalitis.

FDA Issued Warning Letter to GlaxoSmithKline for False Advertising Regarding Topical Antibiotic Ointment

2010-05-07T11:15:00.002Z

Company warned for implying that ointment is effective in treating MRSA infections and other misleading claims

C-diff outbreaks in British and Canadian Hospitals and New Research on C-diff

2010-05-06T01:22:00.006Z

C. diff (Clostridium difficile) may be a normal part of a person's intestinal flora. C. diff Colitis occurs when overuse of antibiotics wipes out competing bacteria, allowing antibiotic resistant C. Diff to overpopulate. C-diff Colititis is a common hospital-spread disease, it is spread through the fecal oral route in cramped areas like hospitals due to insufficient cleanliness. A hospital in North Staffordshire recently had 28 patients affected with the disease a similar outbreak in a hospital in Nanaimo, Canada has led to the deaths of at least three patients. The Irish Health Protection Surveillance Centre reports a drop in C. diff figures. Meanwhile Researchers at New York Hospital's Queens-Weill Cornell Medical College report that C. diff infection is aggravated by low vitamin D levels.

Gonorrhea: A New Drug Resistant Super Strain Emerges

2010-04-30T20:16:00.004Z

A new super strain of the bacterium that causes Gonorrhea (veneral disease, "the clap") is fast emerging that is resistant to multiple varieties of antibiotics. Misuse of antibiotics by the livestock industry is possibly to blame.

Wilful Transmission of HIV

2010-04-29T12:11:00.003Z

AIDS/HIV "Patient Zero" Gaëtan Dugas reportedly used to have unprotected sex with people and then tell them that he was dying from "gay cancer" and that they would probably get it as well. Nowadays a number of countries require HIV infected individuals to disclose their infected status to their sex partners, and people who fail to disclose their infected status may face criminal prosecution for sexual assault or for murder.

The case of one such willful transmitter of HIV, 33-year-old Nushawn Williams is up in court. Williams has served 12 years for statutory rape and reckless endangerment and the government is seeking to keep him locked up indefinitely. Williams boasted of having had sex with up to 300 woman prior to his arrest.

Swine Flu: H1N1 Killing lots of Pregnant Women even before the start of the Cold Season in the Southern Hemisphere

2010-03-22T10:32:00.004Z

Researchers say that 11% of pregnant women admitted to intensive care units in New Zealand and Australia died of H1N1. Swine flu killed 12% of the babies as well

Meanwhile the Australian health minister Nicola Roxon urged Australians to get themselves vaccinated for H1n1 before the flu season starts in May.

Possible Cervarix HPV Vaccine Related Death in the UK

2009-09-29T00:16:00.003Z

A fourteen year old school girl has died in Coventry after being given the HPV vaccine Cervarix as a part of Britain's national HPV immunization campaign for teenage girls. The HPV vaccine protects against infection from some human papillomavirus types which are a cause of cervical cancer.

Rightwing Christians in Britain, have opposed the immunization effort because of the belief that fear of cervical cancer is a deterrent against pre-marital sex and immunization will encourage teenage girls to have pre-marital sex.

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella. (MMR) Vaccine Does Not Cause Autism

2009-09-10T08:31:00.003Z

A extract from Ben Goldacre's book 'Bad Science' on the false claims in the media that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella. (MMR) Vaccine causes autism: The Media's MMR Hoax

Swine Flu: No Need for Travel Restrictions or Border Closure Says WHO

2009-04-28T02:06:00.003Z

The latest WHO (World Health Organization) press release on the Swine Flu reports 20 confirmed cases of death from Swine flu in Mexico, 40 confirmed human infections from Swine Flu in the United States, 6 cases in Canada and 1 case in Spain. However WHO sees no need for placing travel restrictions or closing down borders to stop the spread of the virus. Their advice to individuals is merely to regularly wash their hands with soap and seek medical treatment if they have symptoms of flu.

Related Link
WHO Swine influenza web site

The Hilarious XKCD Webcomic Mocks Swine Flu Induced Mass Panic

2009-04-28T01:12:00.002Z

Swine Flu: World Health Organization raises pandemic alert level from three to four

2009-04-27T23:10:00.005Z

The WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan, has raised the level of influenza pandemic alert from the current phase 3 to phase 4. Level six denotes a full-blown pandemic, Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO Assistant Director General says that the current level signaled a significant step towards pandemic influenza. He also said that since the virus has already spread to several countries other than Mexico, "..at this time, containment is not a feasible option."

Meanwhile Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova declared that the suspected death count of the swine flu epidemic is now at 149, with 20 death confirmed to have been from swine flu. More than 2000 people in Mexico are believed to have been infected.

The European Union Commissioner for Health, Markos Kyprianou, issued a statement advising Europeans to avoid nonessential travel both to Mexico and parts of the United States.

SCUCISD Texas School District that includes 14 Schools Closed for Fear of Swine Flu

2009-04-27T03:07:00.004Z

On sunday, the the Texas Department of State Health Services, made the following press release:

All 14 schools and two district facilities in the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District will be closed effective immediately after several more flu-like illnesses have been discovered in the ongoing Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) swine flu investigation. All extracurricular activities are also cancelled.

Public parks in Cibolo have also been closed.

The federal agency Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports 2 confirmed cases of swine flu in texas and total of 20 cases in the US in their Human Swine Influenza Investigation.

CDC Fears US Deaths From Swine Flu as WHO Issues Warning

2009-04-27T02:16:00.004Z

Following the warning issued by by the UN Agency World Health Organization (WHO) reports of swine flu infections keep turning up from more and more countries. The flu has killed a reported 81 people in Mexico. In the neighbouring US a spokesperson for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency responsible for countering communicable diseases, Dr Anne Schuchat said in response to a question about deaths from swine flu in the US, "I do fear that we will have deaths here". Audio: CDC Podcast on Swine Flu

Cases of swine flu have been reported from New Zealand, France, Spain, Israel and Australia. UK Health officals also expect to have to deal with cases of swine flu in the near future.

Deadly Swine Flu Epidemic in Mexico

2009-04-25T04:06:00.002Z

Mexican government has ordered the closure of numerous schools and other public places in an effort to stop the spread of a flu virus that may have killed more than 60 people in or around the capital Mexico City

U.S. House of Representatives Gym Source of MRSA Infection

2009-04-17T02:35:00.003Z

The 'House Staff Fitness Center' (HSFC) is reported to be the source of the MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) infection that has struck down a staff member at the U.S. House of Representatives

Why Does Influenza Spread More in the Winter?

2009-04-17T02:22:00.003Z

Why do Influenza epidemics occur more in the winter? Virologist Dr. Pater Palese, president of the microbiology department at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York says it's all because of the cold dry air

Graham Linehan Mourns Daily Mail's Two-Faced Policy on HPV Vaccine

2009-04-17T01:51:00.009Z

Graham Lineham (writer and director of The IT Crowd) reports that while the Irish Daily Mail supports vaccination against the HPV virus, the UK Daily Mail is running a scare campaign against HPV vaccination, pandering to the fears of ill-informed members of the public.

The infection of HPV (Human papillomavirus) is the most common sexually transmitted disease. Some HPV types cause the appearance of genital warts, and others cause the appearance of precancerous lesions in women, which lead to cervical cancer.

HPV Vaccination of girls has been opposed by Conservative Christian groups in the UK and the USA, because of the belief that widespread vaccination would encourage engagement in premarital sex.

Vancomycin Resistant Enterococci (VRE) Outbreak Forces Lockdown of Cancer Wards at Royal Adelaide Hospital.

2009-04-14T21:46:00.005Z

The Enterococci superstrain VRE, so-named because of its resistance to the antibiotic Vancomycin (traditionally used only after all other antibiotics have failed), is especially dangerous to people with a compromised immune system.

According to the Dr. Peter Ford of Australian Medical Association, the superbugs have arisen due to the overuse of antibiotics.

Texarkama Syphilis Outbreak Caused by A High Prevalence of Unprotected Sex

2009-04-14T21:26:00.004Z

Texarkana, in Bowie County Texas, is experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of the sexually transmitted disease syphilis since the 1940's.

Meningococcal Meningitis Kills 102 in Chad

2009-04-14T17:35:00.004Z

According to the World Health Organization, Sub-Saharan Africa is facing an epidemic of Meningococcal meningitis with over 17,462 cases reported in Nigeria, the hardest hit country, with over 960 deaths.

Recently, another sub-Saharan African country, Chad also declared a meningitis outbreak.

WHO spokesperson Fadela Chaib says, "A meningitis epidemic is always serious, It overwhelms the health facilities, disrupts routine activities, kills between five and 10 per cent of the patients and can cause brain damage in 10 to 20 per cent of those who survive."

Clostridium difficile (C.diff) Rates Rise in Grampian Scotland

2009-04-13T07:34:00.004Z

NHS survey reveals that cases of infection from antibiotics resistant superstrain Clostridium difficile (C.diff) continue to rise at a significant rate among elderly patients (The Press and Journal)

MRSA Outbreak at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston

2009-04-10T02:31:00.001Z

37 MRSA Cases among mothers and newborns at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center over the past six months.

Hand-foot-and-mouth Disease Kills at least 18 Children in China

2009-04-10T01:50:00.003Z

Hand-foot-and-mouth disease in China kills at least 18 children, possibly more

Measles Outbreak Feared in Wales

2009-04-10T01:34:00.004Z

Presence of large numbers of children who have not been vaccinated against measles causes fears of serious measles outbreak in Wales.

Human Reovirii Offer Hope in Cancer Treatment

2009-04-09T03:27:00.003Z

Cancer researcher Dr. Patrick Lee has proven that human reovirus can infect and kill breast cancer stem cells

Possible HIV, Hepatitis C Infections Among Colonoscopy Patients at Veterans Administration Medical Facility

2009-04-09T01:51:00.004Z

Patients Diagnosed with HIV Following Unhygenic Colonoscopy Procedure at VA Hospital

MRSA Vs. the NFL

2009-04-05T21:23:00.005Z

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the cause of an estimated 19,000 deaths in the United States, every year. Recently the National Football League has been greatly concerned about the spread of MRSA through NFL facilities. Surveys of seven NFL facilities have revealed that the the NFL is winning the fight against MRSA. (sportingnews)

Anthrax War - Documentary Film Unveils US/UK Ties to South African Apartheid Govt.'s Chemical and Biological Weapons Program

2009-04-05T19:37:00.008Z

Anthrax War takes a look at "shadow underworld of bio-war research and development". The film sheds light on the largest recorded outbreak of anthrax among humans in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1978, the South African government's Project Coast a Chemical and Biological Weapons program run with assistance from the U.S. and British governments, horrifying tales of human experimentation and mysterious deaths of Bio-weapons researchers, the mysterious 2001 anthrax attacks and the dangers of the modern "Bio Defence" Industry. The film includes an interview with Wouter Basson AKA Doctor Death, the head of 'Project Coast'.

Here's an interview with Bob Coen

Here's another

West Nile Virus Scare in California

2009-04-05T03:20:00.008Z

The California Department of Public Health West Nile Virus Website reports that there was a new West Nile Virus positive mosquito sample reported in California this week from Contra Costa County also one dead crow and 3 sentinel chickens have tested positive for the WNV.

KMPH-TV website quotes Tim Phillips, assistant manager of The Fresno Mosquito and Vector Control District as saying, "The mosquitoes in your backyard could potentially kill you or your neighbor, and it's especially true this year, because it's come so early and we are so far behind"

While Mercury News reports that The Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District spokesperson Deborah Bass said, "Finding infected mosquitoes this early is evidence the West Nile danger will be present longer this year than usual". The early warm weather this year not only has sped up the mosquitoes' life cycle, she said, but enables mosquitoes' salivary glands to harbor more of the virus, making them potentially more dangerous.

According to the CDC, the West Nile Virus is a seasonal epidemic in North America that flares up in the summer and continues into the fall.

21 Hospital Trusts in Britian Fail to Meet Hygiene and Infection Control Standards

2009-04-05T00:47:00.004Z

New British Health-Care regulatory authority, the CQC (Care Quality Commission) has identified 21 trusts in England which were not doing enough in areas such as cleanliness and decontamination. (BBC)

USA in the Grip of a Salmonella Outbreak?

2009-04-03T21:30:00.003Z

Various food products containing pistachios, peanuts, white pepper and black pepper have been recalled in the U.S at the orders of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 691 persons infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella Typhimurium have been reported from 46 states.

More than 3000 Dead in Zimbabwe Cholera Outbreak

2009-01-28T13:35:00.004Z

The death toll from the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe has now passed the 3,000 mark (BBC)

A Virus That Makes You Fat?

2009-01-26T23:47:00.002Z

Indian-American researcher, Dr Nikhil Dhurandhar thinks that a common cold virus Adenovirus-36 causes obesity in some people. (BBC)

Mass Dog Culling on the Indonesian Island of Bali

2009-01-14T08:23:00.007Z

Around 1000 stray dogs have been culled and canine exports and imports have been banned as a part of Bali provincial government's efforts to combat an outbreak of rabies that has killed several people since last December.

Northern Coast of Australia hit hard by Whooping Cough

2009-01-12T04:38:00.006Z

Infants and small children are especially vulnerable to whooping cough with a mortality rate of aroung 0.5%. The Australian province of New South Wales has recorded the highest rate of whooping cough cases in 17 years.

Measles Epidemic in Britian?

2009-01-09T14:00:00.003Z

There is an "unprecedented increase" in measles cases in England and Wales, experts report. (BBC)

Ebola virus outbreak in Congo leaves 11 dead

2008-12-30T22:37:00.003Z

A somewhat underwhelming development when one considers the over 1,500 people who have died in the ongoing Zimbabwe cholera epidemic, but nonetheless, here's the ebola story, from the International Herald Tribune:

"An Ebola virus outbreak has killed 11 people in western Congo, the health minister said.

A total of 35 people have been infected in Kaluemba, Western Kasai province, where the epidemic began in late November, Health Minister August Mopipi said.

Suspected cases of the highly contagious disease have also been identified in neighboring villages, Mopopi said.

Laboratory tests in both Gabon and Congo's National Institute for Biomedical Research confirmed Ebola in the 11 deaths, he said.

The World Health Organization has confirmed only two Ebola cases, however, and said other diseases were likely involved.

Ebola kills up to 90 percent of the people it infects and is spread through direct contact with the blood or secretions of an infected person or with contaminated objects.

The disease can lie dormant for up to three weeks before flu-like symptoms set in. It then starts attacking internal organs, causing bloody diarrhea and vomiting and death from massive blood loss.

Last year, Ebola killed at least 187 people in the same region of Congo.

Area villagers have recently been reported diarrhea and vomiting of blood, said Olivier Chenebon of the Belgian charity Doctors Without Borders."

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If the past is any indication of how things will turn out in the present, we will likely see the death toll of this outbreak rise considerably.

Zimbabwe Cholera Outbreak Spreads to Neighboring Countries

2008-12-08T01:42:00.012Z

Well I'm sure we're all quite aware by now of the potent threat the cholera epidemic present in Zimbabwe poses; its collapsed infrastructure unable to prevent connected water systems...

Perhaps this will be the final straw that earns Mugabe his head on a platter...

I found a nice micrograph of the bacterium that causes Cholera,
vibrio cholerae, some old slide from U-Consin apparently:

Anyway, here's the Telegraph with the developing story:

"SOUTH AFRICA: Eight deaths and around 500 cases have been reported, most of them Zimbabweans crossing the border to seek treatment.

The South African town of Musina is just over the frontier from Beitbridge, the second worst affected area in Zimbabwe. Army medics are being sent to reinforce a treatment centre in Musina and environmental health officers are going to towns near the frontier.

South Africa is also trying to protect itself by sending some £30,000 of medical supplies, including chlorine tablets and body bags, to keep Zimbabwe's shattered public hospitals open. South African experts are in Beitbridge trying to repair its collapsing water system and supply residents by tanker. Rivers along the border are being screened for cholera after the Limpopo was found to be contaminated.

MOZAMBIQUE: One of Zimbabwe's worst affected districts is Mudzi, on the country's eastern border with Mozambique. That country's health authorities are on "maximum alert" against the spread of cholera, said Ivo Garrido, the health minister.

Specialists have been sent to the border areas, with one newspaper reporting 169 cases of cholera in Changara district, most of them Zimbabweans. None has died.

ZAMBIA: Zimbabwe's northern neighbour has imposed health controls at all three of their shared border posts. One Zimbabwean has died at a cholera centre at the Chirundu crossing. There is a ban on importing uncertified food and anyone entering or leaving Zambia is screened for cholera symptoms.

Mwendoi Akakandelwa, the deputy health minister, said Zambia was on high alert but he ruled out closing the border.

BOTSWANA: At least one Zimbabwean has been treated for cholera in Botswana. Teams have been sent to the border town of Matsiloje, where illegal immigrants live in crowded conditions, to investigate possible infections. The government says it has sufficient medical supplies."

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In case you were wondering what it was like IN ZIMBABWE, here's a report from the Sunday Herald:

"AS ROBERT Mugabe's Zimbabwe government swallowed its pride and asked for international help to contain a cholera epidemic it had insisted a few days earlier was under control, body bags were among the items it requested.

Zimbabweans are dying in their hundreds from a disease which, in the 21st century, should not be a mass killer.

Some are dying as they reach Zimbabwe's major hospitals, only to find them closed because they have no drugs, running water or working equipment. It is in these institutions that the United Nations and the World Health Organisation (WHO) count the dead, arriving at an official death toll of 575.

But the real number of dead is many times greater. The UN and WHO are unable to count those who die in their own homes in the urban townships or in the huts and fields of the rural areas.

WHO says that the normal fatality rate in a modern cholera outbreak, where clean water and medication are available, is below 1%. But the death rate among infected Zimbabweans is at least 4.5% and as high as 30% in remote areas, WHO said."

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It's a pretty grim situation...

Could the BBC's 'Survivors' scenario really happen?

2008-11-29T23:53:00.005Z

YES! Of course it could, that is a stupid question. Anyway, the Times Online has a big article about the new show and its relation to reality:

"The sudden outbreak of a lethal virus that spreads quickly, killing millions, is a nightmare scenario that haunts many of us - especially those who have been watching BBC One's apocalyptic new drama Survivors.

Viruses have indeed wiped out 90 per cent of a human population. We've seen that in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976 with Ebola, an unspeakably nasty affliction caused by a haemorrhagic fever virus that has one of the highest case fatality rates of any human disease. It's one of a family of viruses that you definitely don't want to have, which also includes those responsible for Lassa fever and Marburg fever. But this event did take place in a very isolated area in a small population, with almost no access to medical help.

The lethality of these viruses limits their spread. People become so ill so quickly that they cannot travel far before dying. Ah yes, you say, (if you are the scriptwriter of Survivors), but what if someone boarded an aircraft immediately after infection but before symptoms appeared. Couldn't they spread it halfway across the world and kill 90 per cent of the population that way? No. Sorry to be a Survivors killjoy, but these viruses are pretty much stopped in their tracks by effective isolation and infection-control measures.

On the other hand, a candidate for a really good apocalypse virus is one that can be transmitted by droplet infection in the air, is infectious before a person has any symptoms and is not so lethal that people who have it can't spread it about by traveling. Something like flu, for instance. Pandemic flu is perfect. So would - could - pandemic flu wipe out 90 per cent of the population?

Categorically not, and for a number of reasons. One is logistics. You can't infect everyone at the same time, which means that we would have warning of potential infection and could prepare against it.

Avian flu poses a threat

The most likely (but by no means the only) pandemic flu candidate is H5N1, which causes avian flu in birds, such as chickens and ducks. At present, although human beings can be infected with avian flu and it has a high death rate (about 60 per cent), it is not spread from human being to human being. If it was, we would, thanks to the surveillance systems that the World Health Organisation has in place, know about it quickly, know where it was and could take counter measures. For instance, government might order mass vaccination with a pre-pandemic flu strain. This wouldn't be as effective as a vaccine specific to the particular strain, and would not necessarily prevent infection, but it is highly likely to prevent deaths.

But back to that scary old 60 per cent death rate with avian flu. Jonathan Van Tamm, Professor of Health Prevention at Nottingham University, did the numbers for me. “What this figure means is that 60 per cent of people who get ill with symptoms die, not 60 per cent of the population. It's a big difference.” To understand how many in a population might die from a new virus, you need to know the clinical attack rate, that is the proportion of the population that becomes ill with symptoms. Not everyone will be exposed to it and not all of those exposed are likely to develop symptoms and become sick.

If the clinical attack rate of a pandemic flu virus were, for example, 33 per cent (and not everyone would get it all at once of course, like in Survivors) and there was a case fatality rate of 60 per cent, 20 per cent of the population would die over the period of the pandemic, but this is unlikely.

As Professor Van Tamm says: “History tells us that, so far, we have never encountered a pandemic flu virus with a clinical fatality rate greater than 2.5 per cent (in 1918 it was 2.5 per cent; in 1957 and in 1968 it was less than 0.5 per cent). It's still an awful lot of people (280,000 in 1918) but nothing like the Survivors scenario.

A good plot line, and one that has been exploited in Survivors, is how panic and lack of preparation by government contributed to death rates. But here is the good news. As far as pandemic flu is concerned, which our Government regards as the No 1 threat facing the UK, Britain is among the best, if not the best, prepared countries in the world.

Lest you think this is hype, I took part in the G8 pandemic flu exercise in 2006, a simulation of a worldwide flu crisis in which all of the G8 nations took part. It was immediately apparent that this was the case. Most countries are woefully ill-prepared compared with us. If you want to check out the extensive and detailed plans for pandemic preparedness, they are on the Department of Health's website.

These plans have already been tested, in an exercise in January last year called Winter Willow. Lasting several days, it involved more than 5,000 people. It assumed an attack rate (those developing symptoms) of 30 per cent of the population. There were a number of lessons learnt, such as the need for clearer and more consistent advice on the use of antiviral drugs, face masks and the stocking of home supplies.

But there are other reasons why a flu pandemic is unlikely to mirror the Survivors outbreak. For instance, typically viruses do not retain their lethality. They are modified, with the passage through humans becoming more transmissible but less lethal with time.

Fit young men died within 24 hours

But perhaps the most potent reason is that we are not clones. Our immune systems are not all configured the same, our response to illness is highly variable, even when infected with the same virus. Typically, the old, sick and young would die, but even this isn't always the case. In the 1918 pandemic, fit young men died within 24 hours of infection, not from the virus but as a consequence of the “cytokine storm” unleashed by their healthy immune systems, which go into overdrive and attack the body while fighting the virus.

We are long overdue a flu pandemic. Expert opinion as to when it will happen varies between two and five years. It is certain that 90 per cent of us will not die. It is also certain that a flu pandemic would cause serious disruption to the economy, so, please, will everyone avoid hugging ducks in Asia - at least until we're done with this economic crisis."

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Interesting article, if not a little naive about the potential H5N1 has, or any biological agent for that matter. Ebola and Marburg have something like a 24 hour incubation period. There's no reason a hemorrhagic virus could not mutate (or be purposely developed, for that matter) that has a much longer incubation time.

When it comes to viruses there isn't some magical biological scale which keeps virulence and contagion in check. Usually its a game of red queen between the virus and its hosts for several generations before we see any kind of equilibrium.

Basically, believing that a virus can't have both a high mortality rate and a high infection spread is a belief based on hope and faith that trends in the past will stay the same.

FDA Scientists Revolt Against Corrupt FDA Officials

2008-11-26T05:49:00.003Z

This is the story from NaturalNews.com:

"A group of scientists working in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health division has revolted against the corrupt managers of its own department, accusing them of committing crimes by claiming, "There is extensive documentary evidence that managers at CDRH have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices."

The letter from the FDA's own scientists goes on to say, "It is evident that managers at CDRH have deviated from FDA's mission to identify and address underlying problems with medical devices before they cause irreparable harm, and this deviation has placed the American people at risk."

Congressman John, Dingell, chair of the committee which received the letter, went on to charge that these FDA bureaucrats "approved or cleared medical device applications in gross violation of laws and regulations..."

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The article goes on longer in more depth, I highly recomment reading all of it!

FDA backs new MRSA-specific Antibiotic

2008-11-21T05:22:00.011Z

From the WSJ:

"...The FDA said Theravance's telavancin worked as well as an older drug, vancomycin, in treating the skin infections when reviewing two main clinical studies conducted to examine telavancin. When looking at skin infections caused by just MRSA, the agency said Theravance appeared "numerically" better than vancomycin at treating the infection, but the difference didn't meet a statistical bar showing telavancin was superior..."

"...Later Wednesday the same panel will consider Targanta Therapeutics Corp.'s oritavancin and will look at iclaprim by Swiss biotech company Arpida Ltd. Thursday...."

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Wow, exciting! Something as good as vancomyycin! Let's just try red queening Staph till it beats us down and kills us all! There's no mention of the FDA looking at Zevtara any time soon... oh well...

oh the phDA! So sad, so sad.

Also, this is great news for Targanta, so there may be some boost in their stock price, which is currently rock bottom. (that is not financial advice!!)

Indonesian teen died of H5N1 infection

2008-11-18T23:39:00.002Z

Also, yet another Thai province has had an H5N1 outbreak among poultry farms. But this is sad, and unsettling, news. H5N1 has not gone away and it seems to be as deadly as ever, CIDRAP with the report:

"A 15-year-old Indonesian girl from central Java recently died from an H5N1 avian influenza infection, according to news reports that cited a local health official and a physician who treated the girl.

In June Indonesia's health ministry stopped reporting new H5N1 cases promptly, opting instead for periodic updates. Over the past few days media reports had said the girl's death was suspicious and that she lived near a poultry slaughterhouse, and today the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters reported that the girl had an H5n1 infection.

If the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes the girl's infection, it will be listed as Indonesia's 138th H5N1 case and 113th death.

Agus Suryanto, head of the medical team that treated the girl at Doctor Karyadi Hospital in Semarang, told Reuters that health ministry labs confirmed that the girl died of an avian influenza infection. He told the AP that the girl was hospitalized 10 days before she died"

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This is the first H5N1 death in Indonesia since July.

UK Government to Plant GMO Crops in Secret Military Locations

2008-11-17T06:17:00.008Z

Certainly under the department of the interior, for food production research, right?

Nope! They are growing them in Top Secret Military Locations In Order To "Thwart Angry Anti-GM Extremists." RedGreenandBlue has the story:

"UK officials are hoping to protect genetically-modified crops from the actions of anti-gm extremists. Opponents have targeted almost all of the 54 GM crop trials since 2000. For example, recently more than 400 potato plants were destroyed on a farm at the University of Leeds in June."

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What a perfect cover!!

"Yes, we have to move these GMO crops to top secret military basess so those damned 'frankenfood' nutters won't trample them!"

Well, sounds all and well! But hey, now those crops, all of them, are completely shut off from public scrutiny, and are in the provenance of the military. Which means they have some say in its distribution. Say 2% of those crops were used for military research? What would they be doing?

Possibly developing genetically modified invader species that thrive in commonly used GMO strains of food crops -- Biological warfare -- The cheatgrass that destroys not just farms, but multinational agri-businesses.

Now suppose they manage to develop this "takeover deadwheat" type shit, and some evil traitor sells it for cash?

Well, for one, its now a new illicit bioweapon on the black market for any terrorist organization to chose from and buy with petrodollars.

And secondly, it could very well be the next great plague; not of germs or insects, but of plants, of vile monocultures infecting farmlands -- A Zombie Crop. H.P. Lovecraft considered the idea of this occurring from seeds and spores within a meteorite in his story "A Color out of Space."

And with all these super-hybrids and engineered crops, why wouldn't a weed species genetically adapted to displace them not develop naturally? Now that is a truly scary thought.

New MRSA-specific antibiotic approved in Switzerland

2008-11-15T03:49:00.004Z

Ceftobiprole (aka Zevtera) has passed all its trials and been approved by Swissmedic, which is kind of like the FDA for Switzerland. Fox business (ugh, I know...) has the story:

"Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. announces that ceftobiprole (Zevtera), the first-in-class anti-MRSA broad-spectrum cephalosporin, has obtained regulatory approval from Swissmedic for the treatment of complicated skin and soft tissue infections including diabetic foot infections.

Dr. Anthony Man, CEO of Basilea said, "We are delighted by this approval of ceftobiprole by Swissmedic. This is an important moment for our company and brings a novel and effective treatment against resistant bacteria to patients and physicians here in Switzerland."

The Swiss marketing authorization certificate may be used to facilitate regulatory approval and market entry in other countries including Asia and South America.

The regulatory dossier to Swissmedic was submitted by Basilea's license partner Janssen-Cilag AG, a Johnson & Johnson company, who will commercialize ceftobiprole in Switzerland under the trade name Zevtera.

Ceftobiprole is marketed in Canada and is currently under regulatory review by regulatory authorities in the U.S., the European Union and in other countries. Subject to approval, Basilea will co-promote ceftobiprole in the U.S. and in the major European markets together with the respective Janssen-Cilag companies.

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I hope and also expect a quick approval by the FDA for the use of Zevtera. I'm really surprised Canada got this approved before the US. America often likes proclaim it has some kind of pharmaceutical superiority to Canada, but I have rarely found this to be the case.

Most likely some corrupt Senator or Governor is dishing out grant money for an American company to reverse engineer Zevtera and add some random polymer to get a new patent. Big Pharma has no shortage of lobbyists, that much's for certain!

H5N1 -- It's baaaack!

2008-11-15T00:29:00.003Z

From the Philippine news site Philstar:

"Authorities have confirmed that bird flu has been discovered in fowl in northern Thailand.

Director-general of the Livestock Department Sakchai Sriboonsue says laboratory tests have found the virulent H5N1 virus in chickens in Uthai Thani province, 180 kilometers north of the capital Bangkok.

He said yesterday the virus has been found in about a dozen chickens raised in a backyard farm after several died.

The department confirmed a bird flu outbreak Sunday among fowl in Sukhothai, another northern Thai province. It was the first case of the virus in Thailand since January when two other outbreaks were reported."

-------------------------------------------

They can possibly nip this in the bud by banning backyard chicken farms like Indonesia had to do. Hopefully we won't get any human cases this year. Last season was pretty quiet for H5N1...

Two Nevada Clinics Indicted in Hepatitis C Outbreak

2008-10-25T03:12:00.003Z

From CBS News:

"Investigators think they've identified almost all the people who may have contracted the potentially deadly hepatitis C virus at two Las Vegas outpatient medical clinics, a top public health official said Thursday.

"In putting everything together, we've identified 114 cases in total linked to the two clinics," said Brian Labus, the Southern Nevada Health District's senior epidemiologist.

"We still have some analysis to do," Labus said of the tally, which was up from 86 in July, "but we don't expect the numbers to change much."

District officials say nine cases of the incurable blood-borne liver disease are the result of the unsafe practice of reusing syringes and medicine vials at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada and the Desert Shadow Endoscopy Center.

The other 105 people were diagnosed with the disease since becoming patients at the clinics, but could have contracted the disease in other ways, Labus said.

Health officials say those identified with the disease are receiving treatment. Hepatitis C can cause swelling of the liver, stomach pain, fatigue and jaundice. Even when no symptoms occur, the virus can slowly damage the liver."

------------------------------------------

Wow, w2g clinics!! Reusing needles?!? Yeah, brill idea guys, real fucking clever...

Now that is a class action law suit about to occur.

White Powder Mailed to 10 banks in 2 States

2008-10-20T23:46:00.005Z

From Denver's 9NEWS.com:

"... [We] learned some bank branches in the Denver metro area were evacuated on Monday after at least seven received letters that contained an unidentified white powder.

"Initial tests show it's not harmful, but it is being sent to a lab for further analysis," said FBI Agent Kathy Wright.

All of the banks that were sent the letters were Chase Bank branches.

No one has been taken to the hospital according to Mary Jane Rogers, JP Morgan Chase spokesperson. She says some bank locations were evacuated, but did not have an exact number.

The FBI has also confirmed it has responded to two Chase Bank locations in Denver, and one each in Centennial, Westminster, Lakewood and Arvada. The FBI says all banks were closed for decontamination as a precaution.

The FBI says white powder was also found at a seventh bank, but did not immediately release the location.

Two banks in Oklahoma City also recieved the letters and another in Norman, Okla. also got a letter.

Denver Fire Department confirmed to 9NEWS that one of the affected banks is the Chase Bank located near Martin Luther King Blvd. and Colorado Blvd.

Denver Fire says an employee at that branch found the powder when he opened a letter.

In Westminster, an employee at the branch near 94th and Sheridan opened a letter just before 2 p.m. on Monday. The Westminster Fire Department says 17 people were held while a Hazmat team tested the powder. A test revealed it was harmless and they were released. The FBI took a sample of the substance.

In Arvada, the fire department says the letter was sent to the branch at 80th and Kipling. They determined it was a type of calcium powder and was not hazardous.

The West Metro Fire Department says they responded to a bank at Colorado Mills Mall.

The Cunningham Fire Department says they responded to a bank at Smoky Hill and Buckley just after 1 p.m. The powder there was determined to be not hazardous and the crews left the scene by 4 p.m.

Lutheran Hospital says its emergency room went into lockdown temporarily on Monday afternoon after two people from one of the banks were taken there to get checked out. The lockdown was standard procedure and only lasted for about 35 minutes while the two people were decontaminated.

Rogers says in addition to working with the FBI, JP Morgan Chase is also working with U.S. Postal Inspection Services.

"We are working closely with (the FBI) to ensure the safety of our customers and our employees," she said.

Rogers says she didn't believe authorities know who sent the powder.

"We take these threats seriously," said Rogers.

First reports of suspicious powder began coming in to authorities at 10 a.m. Monday.

------------------------------------------------------------------

So what is this stuff? Baking powder most likely. A classic case of bioterrorism without the actual bio... the delivery system is the weapon. If it looks like Anthrax, you don't really want to be around if it is Anthrax... So Chase banks are being targeted for what seems to be to me industrial terrorism -- this was obviously not pulled off by one or two lone individuals or angry ex-employees -- so we know it was a well-connected conspiracy that was planned out very well in advance and executed professionally. Hmm, doesn't sound like a bunch of Arabs with boxknives...

Could it be the government? In, possibly, a partisan false-flag operation to paint liberals as crazy radicals (they hate money and stuff, obviously, as ultra-liberal leftists...

Sadly, these days, that kind of theory is all too plausible.

The more exciting story, actually, would be right out industrial terrorism -- wherein one corporation terrorizes another for financial gain. Talk about a hostile takeover...

New Virus Identified in Outbreak in South Africa and Zambia

2008-10-17T03:34:00.010Z

Apparently the previously reported "mystery disease" that has cropped up in southern Africa is a newly identified strain of virus from the Arenaviridae family. So the story goes:

"The results of tests conducted at the Special Pathogens Unit, National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) of the National Health Laboratory Service in Johannesburg, and at the Special Pathogens and Infectious Disease Pathology branches of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, USA, provide preliminary evidence that the causative agent of the disease which has resulted in the recent deaths of 3 people from Zambia and South Africa, is a virus from the Arenaviridae family."

-----------------------

So what family of virus is this, you might ask?

It is the family of viruses whose brethren and sistren are agents of hemorrhage, meningitis, hepatic necrosis, and liver failure. Sounds like a barrel of fun, that bunch!

also:

"..Analysis continues at the NICD and CDC in order to characterize this virus more fully.."

Sounds good to me chaps! This thing seems contagious and that is not good buddies. That means it is either airborne, waterborne, or bloodborne. If its airborne, of course, we could all be screwed... depending on its virulence.

Any progress on MRSA?

2008-10-17T03:09:00.002Z

Apparently not much... From the BBC News:

"Concerns are being raised about NHS performance on infection control in England - just weeks after ministers announced MRSA targets had been met.

The Healthcare Commission's annual report on NHS performance showed a quarter of trusts were struggling to meet the hygiene code.

The data also showed that just over half of hospitals had managed a sustained reduction in MRSA rates.

It comes after ministers claimed they were winning the superbug fight.

In September, Gordon Brown hailed the "tremendous achievement" in halving the national MRSA rate over the previous three years.

But the watchdog adopts a slightly different approach to measuring performance.

Instead of relying on national quarterly figures as the government does, the Healthcare Commission uses annual figures broken down on a trust-by-trust basis which officials said was a better demonstration of sustained improvement.

These showed that only 52% of trusts had reduced MRSA by 60% - the figure was set higher than the national target in talks with ministers to ensure it was met across the board."

-----------------------------

The number manipulation is even worse in U.S. hospitals, BTW... Institutional fudging is endemic in most hospitals.

Tainted milk sickens 6,200 Chinese babies, kills 3

2008-09-17T19:52:00.003Z

From the AP:

"The government was dispatching thousands of inspectors to monitor producers as officials reported Wednesday that the number of babies sick from tainted milk formula had climbed dramatically to nearly 6,200 from 1,200 a day earlier.

At least three children have died and more than 1,300 others, mostly newborns, remain hospitalized with dozens suffering from acute kidney failure.

Health Minister Chen Zhu said he expected the numbers of affected babies to increase as "more and more parents take kids to the hospital."

The head of China's quality control watchdog agency, Li Changjiang, said 5,000 inspectors will be sent out nationwide to monitor companies after government testing showed that 20 percent of the companies producing milk powder had dairy products with melamine.

The chemical additive was at the center of a pet food scandal in the United States in 2007. An estimated 1,500 dogs and cats died after ingesting a pet food ingredient manufactured in China that was laced with melamine."

---------------------------------------------

This is extremely sad, but also infuriating. Hello, China!! Melamine kills dogs and cats, why the fuck are you putting it in baby formula?! You would think that these rat-bastard Chinese companies would have been shut down and their owners shot in the head and the bill sent to their family. I guess nowadays there's no hard justice in China, just authoritarianism and corruption.

Corruption that is killing babies. Are you happy that your failure to have a real food inspection program is now killing your children, oh government of China? The party of the "people" - that you are killing with your failure to regulate food, drugs, or even air quality.

I'm just so disgusted.

Seven Hospitalized in C. Diff Outbreak

2008-08-20T04:57:00.003Z

The Queen Margaret Hospital of Dunfermline now has a seventh patient added to the list of those infected by the C. Diff scourge. Here's more on story from BBC News:

"The outbreak was discovered after patients at ward six of Queen Margaret Hospital, Dunfermline, fell ill.

They tested positive for C.diff after developing diarrhoea on Friday and have all since been nursed in isolation.

Labour MSP Helen Eadie has called for an inquiry into infection control methods in hospitals after a fatal outbreak in West Dunbartonshire.

Nine people died as a result of C.diff, which was a contributory factory in the deaths of a further nine. A total of 55 others were affected by the outbreak at the Vale of Leven hospital.

In the latest outbreak, NHS Fife said relatives of the ill patients had been urged not to visit to help control the spread.

Ms Eadie, the Dunfermline East MSP, said she was "very concerned" at the latest outbreak."

-----------------------------------------

The article does not mention the type of ward the spread of the disease actually began in... its just mentioned vaguely as "ward six." Like I'm supposed to know what that means!

Legionnaires outbreak claims life

2008-08-15T04:50:00.003Z

From WETM, out of the Twin Tiers in NY/PA:

"ELMIRA -- One of four residents of an Elmira apartment complex who were infected with Legionnaires Disease this week has died, her family said.

Anna Marie Tongate, 75, died Thursday afternoon, three days after she was diagnosed with the bacterial disease. Her family took her to the hospital on Sunday because they felt she was very ill, said Christina Bruner Sonsire, an attorney for the family.

Tongate and three other residents at Flannery Towers displayed flu-like symptoms last week, but the staff did nothing to address the illnesses, Sonsire said in a statement.

Sonsire added her law firm -- Ziff, Weiermiller, Hayden & Mustico -- will investigate how Tongate and three other residents were infected with Legionnaires Disease, and why nobody recognized the problem.

A message was left with the Chemung County Health Department Thursday evening seeking comment on the outbreak."

----------------------

Sad, the death could probably have been prevented with prompt attention to the situation.

US bioweapons labs threaten Americans

2008-08-15T02:43:00.005Z

Here's a repost from the LA Times Editorial Blog of a great expose of the US bioweapons program:

"'Whatever you can say about the Soviet bioweapons scientists," a Bush administration official once told me, "they never killed anyone."

We can't say the same about our bioweapons scientists. Someone, most likely Bruce Ivins, at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md., turned powdered anthrax spores into a deadly weapon. It's ironic that the Soviet scientists were making offensive weapons. Our people, since 1969, have worked strictly to defend us.

One of those defenders killed five people, sickened 17 others and plunged the nation into hysteria for weeks in the fall of 2001. After a seven-year investigation by the FBI, the source of the deadly anthrax strain has been identified -- our own biodefense program at Ft. Detrick. That is the real legacy of the FBI investigation.

Since the anthrax-laced letters were mailed in September and October of 2001, U.S. biodefense has blown up out of all proportion to any rational assessment of the bioweapons threat. Earlier this year, an article in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, analyzing government biodefense spending from 2001 to 2008, stated that $49.66 billion has been allocated for civilian biodefense. According to microbiologist and longtime biodefense critic Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, actual spending is even higher, amounting to $57 billion.

In 2005, he and 757 other microbiologists sent a stinging open letter to Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, protesting the government's preoccupation with "priority pathogens" -- germs such as anthrax that could be used in a bioweapons attack. But Zerhouni and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, would have none of it. In a letter published in the journal Science, they disagreed: "The United States has experienced an anthrax attack, and security experts repeatedly express concern that future attacks with biological weapons are likely, if not inevitable."

But we didn't actually experience an anthrax attack. The whole incident amounted to a snake eating its own tail. No ingenious biowarrior from Al Qaeda sent the lethal envelopes through the U.S. postal system. An American scientist did. The FBI and its genetic analyses leave no doubt: Though 16 laboratories had access to the "Ames strain" of anthrax used in the letters, only the samples that came from Ivins' laboratory at Ft. Detrick matched the genetic fingerprint of the attack strain.

In the sorry aftermath of the anthrax investigation, it's clear that the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have to rethink the priority-pathogens list, which includes anthrax, smallpox, plague, tularemia, Ebola and other germs that rarely, if ever, threaten American lives. It's the "non-defense-related" germs that are killing us. Randall Wolcott of the Southwest Regional Wound Care Center points out that 500,000 Americans a year die of biofilm infections -- such as diabetic ulcers -- that are almost impossible to treat by conventional means. That's almost twice as many as die of cancer. "

---------------------------------------------

Total article is longer... check it out.

Of course, it tows the party line in going along with the idea that some "lone nut" stole anthrax and mailed it. The Capitol Hill Anthrax Attacks were, I believe, perpetrated by the CIA on the directive of the executive branch.

What are ESBLs?

2008-08-13T19:58:00.004Z

Well, it's some kind of thing I guess that infects newborn babies. There was a recent attack in a UK hospital, here's the BBC with a quip:

A potentially life-threatening superbug has been found in the intensive care unit used for newborn babies at the Royal Blackburn Hospital.

Some babies have been identified as carrying the bug, called extended-spectrum beta-lactamase, or ESBL.

Fortunately, the CDC is a bit more illuminating with what this "superbug" is:

ESBLs are enzymes that mediate resistance to extended-spectrum (third generation) cephalosporins (e.g., ceftazidime, cefotaxime, and ceftriaxone) and monobactams (e.g., aztreonam) but do not affect cephamycins (e.g., cefoxitin and cefotetan) or carbapenems (e.g., meropenem or imipenem).

Which means they are weird enzymes that attach to bacteria and cause them to become resistant against many types of antibiotics.

So where do these enzymes come from?? They come from certain other unicellular organisms such as E. Coli and the bacteria themselves.

One question no one answers, when did these superbugs start producing this enzyme? It seems pretty specific to me... This reeks of deliberate genetic manipulation of enzyme production that went awry or was possibly purposefully created to cause a rise in infant mortality.

And now it is killing babies.

Hepatitis E Outbreak Kills Nine Ugandans

2008-08-13T19:30:00.004Z

Found this from Bloomberg:

"Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- An outbreak of Hepatitis E in Uganda killed at least nine people in four districts over the last week, bringing the death toll since July 17 to 25, the Daily Monitor reported, citing the Health Ministry.

The disease has killed 106 of 6,563 people infected in the northern districts of Kitgum, Gulu, Pader and Yumbe since October 2007, when cases of the illness were first detected, the Kampala-based newspaper said, citing Kenya Mugisha, director of clinical health services at the ministry.

Hepatitis is transmitted through water contaminated with feces. The virus, common in neighboring South Sudan, causes jaundice and fever. The first reports of the outbreak came from refugee camps in Kitgum housing people displaced by a two-decade insurgency by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army."

----------------------------------------

Fortunately, Hepatitis E is very very rare in the USA and most Western nations.

C. Diff Outbreak 'Worst Ever' in UK

2008-08-06T03:09:00.009Z

Apparently eight are dead in Northern Trust area of Ireland and cases have doubled double in Belfast hospitals.

From The Belfast Telegraph:

"Fears over the spread of the deadly superbug Clostridium Difficile were growing last night after a second health trust declared an outbreak of the killer infection as the worst ever in the UK.

Just hours after the Northern Trust confirmed that a further eight deaths last month in the area were linked to C.Difficile, the Belfast Trust also announced an official outbreak after the number of cases doubled in a month.

The latest deaths in the Northern area, which occurred at Antrim Area Hospital, bring to 61 the provisional number linked to the bug since the outbreak first took hold last summer — with 40 of those patients having died since the beginning of this year.

But a Northern Trust spokesman insisted there was a reduction in the number of new infection cases.

“The Trust has identified a total of 19 new cases of Clostridium Difficile in July 2008,” he said."

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Watch this hospital get a class action lawsuit put against it... They have those in Ireland, right?

The fact is, the UK's national health care system is not immune to lost or squandered money that should have gone into maintenance and staff training. Not that I'm supporting the US healthcare "sysem" -- but let's not get into single payer insurance plans or universal health care...

Anyway, watch out all of you who live in Northern Belfast - the hospitals are sick!

1 2 3 4 KINGDOM!

Any one know what I'm talking about? Riget? It is a must see!!

Inquiry into MRSA Death

2008-08-05T23:58:00.006Z

The law is getting involved in the alleged MRSA death of a Southampton woman who had just undergone heart surgery at a local hospital.

Video is here at the BBC News site!

Chemtrails linked to Morgellons disease

2008-08-05T07:35:00.004Z

In case you happen to be wondering what chemtrails are, Educate-Yourself has a nice intro to them here, wherein it is explained:

For [several years now], the military has been spraying the skies throughout America, Canada, and now parts of Europe (including Britain, France, and the Netherlands) with substances that were initially referred to as "mystery contrails" , but later were named "chemtrails" by investigative reporter and author William Thomas.

Its my honest opinion that there is more than enough evidence out there to confirm the likelihood of a chemtrail-like bio-chemical experiment being conducted by several major world powers on their own respective citizens.

Apparently there is evidence to indicate a possible link between chemtrails and Morgellons disease. Io9 quotes chemtrail research activist Carolyn Williams Palit, saying:

Chemtrail activists collect evidence that the chemtrail spray contains not only germs but conductive metals, blood cells, carbon powders, sedatives, nano-particulates, crystalline substances, alumina particulates, barium powders, and a kind of polyethylene-silicon fiber . . . The chemtrail fibers are a kind of infant, “pre-Morgellons” fiber. The Morgellons fibers are more developed, but the fibers are related to the type of nanotechnology that assembles nanowires.

I should note at this point that Morgellons syndrome is a controversial and disputed illness in the medical community. As a medical anthropologist I must say that BioCulturaly it is a disease, since it has been described, but it may be a pseudo-pathology. Its proximate cause and subsequent ramifications for pathophysiology are currently nothing much more than spurious conjecture. From our trusted friend, Wikipedia:

Morgellons is currently not recognized as a unique disorder, so there is currently no list of symptoms or differential diagnosis for Morgellons that is generally accepted by the medical community. Patients usually self-diagnose based on media reports and information published by the Morgellons Research Foundation. Symptoms usually include:

Disturbing sensations of insect-like crawling, stinging or biting on or under the skin (i.e. formication)
Skin rashes and lesions that do not heal
Fiber-like filaments, granules or crystals that appear on or under the skin or that can be extracted from lesions
Joint, muscle and connective tissue pain, including fibromyalgia
Debilitating fatigue
Cognitive dysfunction, including difficulty with concentration, short-term memory, and attention

-- Skin lesions on hand from Morgellons syndrome

So, since most current hypotheses blow hard chunks, here's my personal take: This is a cluster of symptoms that tend to occur together, which is why it is commonly referred to as a syndrome. Usually such disorders have one or ver few causes that create the bodily reactions that manifest in these symptoms.

Now, if chemtrails contain microfilaments, and these microfiliments grow into fibrous subcutaneous cysts that are accompanied by delusions and mental dysfunction, these things must be both toxic to the skin and also when inocculated act as a neurotoxin on the CNS, causing hallucinations and mental impairment. Which means the microfiliments must be coated in a toxin that causes both skin rash and psychological effects.

It is most likely that the microfiliments (or microfibers) enter the bloodstream and subsequently muscle tissue through the open skin leisions they cause. Itching and scratching the rashs and sores will exacerbate this. Seeing as there are no respitory symptoms, it is less likely that the lungs are involved in spreading the microfiliments. If we are to assume that these things are crystaline in nature then they could possibly attract and form larger fibrous like masses as they spread through out the body, apparently lodging mainly in muscle tissue, where they have been previously extracted in clinical settings.

Now we need case studies of people who have been known to have been under heavy chemtrail activity developing Morgellons.

Get crackin'!

La Mancha Negra

2008-08-04T19:36:00.011Z

From Environmental Grafitti:

"A looming shape becomes visible through the gloom and Perez, who drives these roads every day, knows exactly what it is - he swerves, losing control of the car, sparks go flying and for a brief moment his life flashes before his eyes, yet somehow he wrestles the wheel round and brings the vehicle to a controlled stop. The taxi driver and his passengers have narrowly avoided become the latest victim of the Venezuelan terror blob, a horrifying monster that has so far claimed the lives of over 1800 people.

Venezuelans call it La Mancha Negra - The Black Stain - but the layer of thick goo covering an eight mile stretch of road outside Caracas resembles a terrifying blob straight out of a 1950’s sci-fi movie and just like the latter, it has been responsible for hundreds of deaths. So what is it and where did it come from?

Many explanations have been offered, from extraterrestrial intervention to poorly made asphalt road, but the Venezuelan government remains mystified - even experts flown in from around the globe have been unable to shed light on it. And whilst the authorities remain stumped, the blob has not only expanded to over one hundred times its original size, but killed hundreds of motorists.

Whatever the hell it is, it appears to be on a large stretch of road and growing...

Over 1800 people have been killed on an eight-mile stretch in the last five years - an astonishing tally - and although the blob may not be directly responsible for all them all, the danger posed is plain for all to see.

Ruth Capriles, Venezuela’s foremost whistle-blower and author of the two-volume ‘Corruption Dictionary’ - a compendium of the nation’s corruption cases - has her own theory on the blob: she thinks political opponents of President Carlos Andres Perez were dumping oil on the roads to make his government look bad. “There could be corruption, but who knows for sure? Everybody is giving a different explanation.” Then there is the theory that raw sewage from slums somehow is flowing under the roads and triggering a chemical reaction in the asphalt.

Sounds dangerous! If its some kind of organic toxic sludge then its not just a hazard for motorists, that's for sure.

At least 15 cases confirmed in E.coli Boy Scouts outbreak

2008-08-03T20:37:00.005Z

The E. Coli outbreak that occurred in a popular Boy Scout camp in Goshen, Virginia roughly a week ago is still growing. Over the span of a week the number jumped from 9 to 15 confirmed cases of potentially deadly E. coli poisoning.

From the AP:

"Public health officials have confirmed 15 cases of E. coli among dozens of people sickened after attending a popular Boy Scout camp in Virginia."

Also the Washington Post is reporting that 2 boys have been hospitalized:

"The Virginia Department of Health began receiving reports of sick children on Sunday, when boys from about 70 troops returned home after a week at the Goshen Scout Reservation near Lexington, Va., about three hours from Washington. Two of the boys were hospitalized, officials said."

How many is 70 troops? WTF kind of reporting is that? 70 troops? We're not all Eagle Scouts here!
I'm going to estimate roughly 25 children and 3 adults as a "troop." Multiply that by 70 and we have 1,960 individuals potentially infected with E. Coli. I have no idea though because no news reports aren't actually giving out actual attendance figures...

70 troops?! I mean its not like saying "2 US Battalions" now is it?? I mean I can look that up figure out how many individual soldiers they're talking about but this boyscout troop shit is nonsense!

After suicide, feds consider closing anthrax case

2008-08-03T10:49:00.012Z

Because any further investigation would lead them straight to the CIA! It's textbook CIA methods,
the execution style, the ambiguity of it all, perfect climate of peak post-911 fear...

Well, anyway, from the AP Report:

"Answers to one of the nation's most high-profile unsolved mysteries are in documents that could be released as early as this week — and help explain how the government chased the wrong suspect for years."

In other words: "The government may or may not release information they have regarding the anthrax attacks."

There's more:

The Justice Department attributed the break in the case to "new and sophisticated scientific tools" that cost the FBI about $10 million. Investigators said the science focused, in part, on how the anthrax strains were handled and who had access to it at the time of the mailings.
FBI scientists were able to isolate strains used in the attacks, and determined they were not as common as previously thought. And that led investigators to Ivins.
Had the same process been available years ago, it would have cleared Hatfill much earlier, according to two people familiar with the FBI investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is not officially closed.
David R. Franz, a former commander of the Army's lab biological warfare labs at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked, said Saturday he thought it was "very important that the FBI present their case against Bruce and not just state that the investigation was over because it was him and he's gone."
Franz added, "I'm concerned about what closing this case without conclusive evidence might do to harm our life sciences enterprise. ... I think we as Americans need to see the proof."

Obviously the guy killing himself doesn't prove his guilt and this "breakthrough technique" sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me... He was a "suspect" in the obviously faseflag anthrax attacks so now they can be lack, "well he was our only lead..." and quiet most of the whiners... It'll probably work, too.

I completely agree with everything Cmdr. Franz is saying. Perhaps if this gets enough attention more information will come out and have possible evidence indicating that this was indeed an inside job.

C. Diff Infections Doubled between 2000 and 2005

2008-04-24T03:04:00.002Z

From MSNBC:

"Cases of potentially deadly diarrheal infections jumped by more than 200 percent in the nation’s hospitals between 2000 and 2005, fueling new worries about the next bad bug.

Some 301,200 people contracted Clostridium difficile-associated disease — known as CDAD — in 2005, more than twice as many as previously counted, and 28,600 people died from the infection that year, according to a new report by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

That sharp spike follows a 74 percent increase in the number of CDAD cases recorded between 1993 and 2000. Overall, more than 2 million patients contracted the serious intestinal infection between 1993 and 2005, the report showed.

“It is the next major germ threat,” said Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York state who now heads the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths — RID — an agency that focuses on improving infection control in hospitals and health care settings.

The bacterium, commonly referred to as C. diff, is as worrisome as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a drug-resistant infection linked to more than 94,000 infections and nearly 19,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005, McCaughey said."

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Looks like C. Diff is way out of control... Can't people keep hospitals clean these days???

Deadly Bird Flu Strain Found in UK Wild Fowl

2008-01-13T06:18:00.000Z

From Bloomberg:

"The deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza was detected in three dead swans in southwest England, the U.K. environment ministry said.

The outbreak in the Chesil Beach area of Dorset is the first of the year and only the fourth time the H5N1 strain has been detected in the U.K. The beach is near Abbotsbury Swannery, a colony of nesting mute swans. The ministry didn't say if the dead birds were found there.

"No disease has been found in domestic birds, and a program of surveillance is being carried out in the local wild bird population,'' the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said today in an e-mailed statement. "There will be no culling of wild birds because such action may disperse birds further and would not aid control."

The H5N1 strain of bird flu can be lethal in humans, and 216 of the 348 people who have contracted the illness since 2003 have died, according to Jan. 3 World Health Organization figures.

The ministry set up a 3-kilometer (2-mile) control area and a 10-kilometer monitoring area around the site, banning gatherings of domestic birds and requiring bird-keepers to house their fowl and isolate them from wild birds. The telephone line for John Houston, general manager of the swannery, was busy.

The strain of bird flu has previously only been found once in wild birds in Britain, when a single dead swan was found in Scotland in April 2006. Since then, there have been outbreaks at poultry farms in Suffolk, eastern England, in February and November last year, leading to the culling of thousands of domestic birds."

--------------------------

So High-Path H5N1 is now hitting wild fowl in the UK... This is a fantastically doom-ridden news piece!

Weeee!

Bird Flu Survival Gear -- My Picks!

2008-01-05T10:52:00.001Z

Welcome to my Official Guide to Surviving a global Avian Influenza Pandemic Scenario. First of, these items are very good things to have:

<--- You'll want a half-face respirator, the 3M one's are very stylish and affordable. Don't forget extra filter cartridges!.

Ok, your respiratory system is safe, but you're going to want to stock up on OTC medications. You even get Mucuous Release Tablets.

If you do get a chest cold you'll need something to calm that cough, as well as something to loosen congestion.

NOW!

You need to get a whole bunch of microfiber pads to clean your equipment with. Don't forget about guns, ammunition and little things you can turn into booby traps.

Try to keep your pets indoors as much as possible. Minimize contact with central hubs of meeting and transit.

Make sure you have at least 3 months of food in the household. It is absolutely essential to have a shortwave radio on hand as well.

DURING...

Stay the fuck out of a hospital - unless you are a doctor - then remain in the hospital and never leave.

After a certain point there will be large abandoned warehouses that are no longer watched over by the authorities. It will be 21st century hoovervilles.

If you are connected to the internet, run any and all distributed computing projects that deal with finding a cure or vaccine for H5N1.

AFTER:

It is estimated that any vaccine against the human-to-human strain of H5N1 will take 6 to 8 months to develop - starting at the time of first outbreak.

If you are still alive then, go to public health and get your shot. Welcome back to civilization!

Merck Admits to Injecting Cancer Viruses with Vaccines

2007-12-10T06:23:00.000Z

I just heard about this and it blew my mind!
Watch this video, it stands for itself:

Weee! "Well, we had to replace the mercury with something... how 'bout some cancer causing viruses??"

Uganda Ebola Outbreak: 350 Quarantined

2007-12-07T17:44:00.000Z

Well first it was Congo, now Uganda has an Ebola outbreak. I wish I could say that the Congolese Ebola spread to Uganda, but the two countries happen to be separated by the rather large country of Zaire, so that seems unlikely. I guess the virus is just endemic in central Africa... Here's the story from AllAfrica:

"About 350 people who have had contact with Ebola victims have been confined to their homes for monitoring in Bundibugyo and Kasese districts. About 253,000 people in the five sub-counties of Bundibugyo district are at risk of contracting the deadly hemorrhagic fever, the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health said yesterday.

They added that Bundibugyo town council was the most affected.

"We have established that 335 such people participated in burying some of the cases, either as relatives or sympathizers," the Bundibugyo district chairman, Jackson Bambalira, said.

The National Task Force put the figure of the people being followed at 327.

"I am greatly worried that a bigger Ebola bomb could explode, claiming many more lives," Bambalira said.

He added that another 20 people in Kasese had also been confined at home. The suspects were tracked down by local and international experts this week.

Since August when the killer disease broke out, ninety-three were confirmed infected, 24 of whom have died among them Dr Jonah Kule, and four health workers. Kasese, Mbarara and Kabarole districts have been put on high alert.

Blood specimens are being collected for testing at the newly-established Ebola lab, which begins to work this weekend. Results will now be out within 24 hours unlike in the past when the samples would be taken to the US.

Community leaders in Bundibugyo and Kasese have also been registering suspected cases and deaths. LCs have been ordered to restrict movement into homesteads where cases are suspected.

UPDF doctors have also joined the local and international experts in Bundibugyo to combat Ebola, including sensitizing the population. Dr. Kule and the other health workers who died of Ebola were buried yesterday at Bundibugyo Hospital."

--------------------------------------------

I would like to take this time to personally honor Dr. Kule, and all those like him who risk disease and death to help developing nations get medical care. They, in my mind, are true heroes and deserve recognition; especially at a time like this, when one of them dies "in the line of duty."

Amazing Article on Viruses

2007-12-06T03:49:00.000Z

I was e-mailed an article from The New Yorker about mankind's continued battle against viruses. It's incredibly insightful, but also very long. I suggest you read the whole thing, but I'll only post a few choice quotes from the article here:

"Nothing — not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone. Those viruses were highly infectious, yet their impact was limited by their ferocity: a virus may destroy an entire culture, but if we die it dies, too. As a result, not even smallpox possessed the evolutionary power to influence humans as a species—to alter our genetic structure.

That would require an organism to insinuate itself into the critical cells we need in order to reproduce: our germ cells. Only retroviruses, which reverse the usual flow of genetic code from DNA to RNA, are capable of that. A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell’s DNA. It then becomes part of that cell forever; when the cell divides, the virus goes with it.

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

When the sequence of the human genome was fully mapped, in 2003, researchers also discovered something they had not anticipated: our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors."

and this:

"Because they no longer seem to serve a purpose or cause harm, these remnants have often been referred to as “junk DNA.” Many still manage to generate proteins, but scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick.

Then, last year, Thierry Heidmann brought one back to life. Combining the tools of genomics, virology, and evolutionary biology, he and his colleagues took a virus that had been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, figured out how the broken parts were originally aligned, and then pieced them together. After resurrecting the virus, the team placed it in human cells and found that their creation did indeed insert itself into the DNA of those cells. They also mixed the virus with cells taken from hamsters and cats. It quickly infected them all, offering the first evidence that the broken parts could once again be made infectious. The experiment could provide vital clues about how viruses like H.I.V. work. Inevitably, though, it also conjures images of Frankenstein’s monster and Jurassic Park."

and finally:

"The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg once wrote that the “single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on this planet is the virus.” Harmit Malik, an evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, acknowledges the threat, yet he is confident that viruses may also provide one of our greatest scientific opportunities. Exploring that fundamental paradox—that our most talented parasites may also make us stronger—has become Malik’s passion. “We have been in an evolutionary arms race with viruses for at least one hundred million years,’’ he told me recently, when I visited his laboratory. “There is genetic conflict everywhere. You see it in processes that you would never suspect; in cell division, for instance, and in the production of proteins involved in the very essence of maintaining life.

“One party is winning and the other losing all the time,” Malik went on. “That’s evolution. It’s the world’s definitive game of cat and mouse. Viruses evolve, the host adapts, proteins change, viruses evade them. It never ends.” The AIDS virus, for example, has one gene, called “vif,” that does nothing but block a protein whose sole job is to stop the virus from making copies of itself. It simply takes that protein into the cellular equivalent of a trash can; if not for that gene, H.I.V. might have been a trivial disease. “To even think about the many million-year processes that caused that sort of evolution,” Malik said, shaking his head in wonder. “It’s dazzling.”

------------------------------------

In order to understand retroviruses so we can combat them, we have to mess around with them: recreate them, try and change their DNA. The unfortunate downside, of course, is that as this becomes easier to do, it becomes a more appealing biological weapon for terrorists and rogue states.

I have always maintained that continued scientific investigation always outweighs the possible consequences, but this line of research is treading very close to "dangerous science."

The article also discusses how one researcher managed to bioengineer the polio virus, just to "prove that it could be done." Now that, in my opinion, is just plain fucked up.

Eight New Ebola Cases in Congo

2007-09-26T01:24:00.000Z

From the Associated Press:

"GENEVA (AP) — Eight more cases of Ebola have been identified in Congo, raising to 17 the number of people confirmed to have contracted the deadly illness, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

The cases were confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told reporters in Geneva.

The outbreak in Congo is the first major resurgence of Ebola in years.

At least 170 people have died — though only six were confirmed to have had Ebola — in the affected region of Kasai Occidental over the past four months, and more than 400 have fallen ill, Chaib said.

The fate of the eleven remaining confirmed cases is unknown, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.

Some of the cases have tested negative for Ebola, but positive for other diseases like shigella — a diarrhea-like disease — or typhoid. Some of the patients have improved after being given antibiotics, which would have no impact on Ebola, WHO experts said.

According to WHO the so-called "Zaire strain" of Ebola kills over 80 percent of those infected through massive blood loss, and has no cure or treatment. It is spread through direct contact with the blood or secretions of an infected person, or objects that have been contaminated with infected secretions.

Congo's last major Ebola outbreak struck in Kikwit in 1995, killing 245 people. Kikwit is about 185 miles from the site of the current outbreak.

WHO says more than 1,000 people have died of Ebola since the virus was first identified in 1976 in Sudan and Congo. Primates, hunted by many central Africans for food, can carry the virus."

Cryptosporidium Outbreak In Western US

2007-09-22T22:25:00.000Z

And in my own old home state, too! Oh Idaho, first Sen. Craig and now Cryptosporidium... I think your PR campaign is going great. Boise will big the #1 hotspot for gay tourists, and you also get an excuse to maybe get a contract for a biodefense lab for the state (run on Nuclear energy of course!). Any way, here's the AP with the story:

"BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Nearly 230 Idaho residents have been sickened by a waterborne parasite this year, along with hundreds of others across the Rocky Mountain West, health officials said.

The cryptosporidium outbreak has reached record numbers, Idaho Department of Health and Welfare spokesman Tom Shanahan said, and has federal officials looking at the role water parks and public pools play in spreading the diarrhea-causing parasite.

Since 1995, Idaho has averaged about 23 cryptosporidium cases a year, said Dr. Randall Nett, an epidemic intelligence officer with Idaho's Health and Welfare Department. But this year, 229 cases have been reported, the vast majority in the Boise and Meridian areas.

Nearby Utah has been even harder hit, with more than 1,600 illnesses attributed to cryptosporidium so far this year, Utah Department of Health epidemiologist Diane Raccasi said.

"It's a record year by a long way," said Nett. "There's probably going to have to be some research done to determine if it was weather, rainfall, runoff or other things contributing to the outbreak."

Colorado and other Western states have also reported increases, Nett said. However, Montana has seen a decrease. There have been 42 cryptosporidium cases so far this year, compared to 93 at this point in 2006, according to Jon Ebelt, spokesman for the Montana Department of Public Health and Services. There were 152 total cases last year, driven in part by an outbreak at a Missoula water park, Ebelt said.

Health officials believe splash parks and other recreational water parks can offer the hardy parasite the opportunity to rapidly spread from person to person.

Splash parks are often a feature of city parks, and are popular with younger children because they require no swimming skills. Instead of a pool, water sprays up from spouts in the ground, somewhat like a glorified sprinkler system. Many parks also feature water guns or water slides.

But at parks where water is recirculated, the spray can rinse any contamination — whether from diarrhea, vomit or dirt — down into a water holding area and back up through the water spouts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Unfortunately, there's no national pool code to regulate how these splash pads are designed, so the CDC is working with a consortium of scientists to come up with a model pool code," similar to what the Food and Drug Administration created for food, Nett said.

"To prevent outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis, change is needed in the way we build and operate the nation's disinfected recreational water facilities," the CDC wrote in a report earlier this summer. "Key changes call for the inclusion of new supplementary disinfection measures that kill the parasite ... and existing chlorine disinfection."

--------------------------------------------------------------

And waterparks are a huge thing in Idaho and Utah, too... the big tunnel ride kind with the giant wave pool. Man those are fun.

Too bad the waterpark industry couldn't standardize cleaning and filtration processes to make them safe... heh. Just goes to show you the lack of standardization when an industry is unregulated.

"Hey there ain't no law that says we can't skimp on our Muriatic acid levels, so fuck it lets save a few nickels!"

It's this kind of thinking that leads to regulation. The market can solve this, but every market solution is a reaction, and prevention is either legislated or the business must up and decide to regulate themselves.

Ebola Spreads in Congo

2007-09-12T20:58:00.001Z

As always, the assurances by the local government that they have an outbreak under control were untrue. Here's what Reuters is reporting on the situation:

"Health workers launched an emergency operation on Wednesday to fight an outbreak of deadly Ebola haemorrhagic fever in southern Congo, airlifting supplies, setting up isolation tents and disinfecting contaminated areas.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and medical NGOs such as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) joined local health authorities in a major logistics operation to try to contain the outbreak in Kasai Occidental province of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Congo's government, citing test results from international laboratories, said on Monday at least five cases of Ebola had been confirmed in the province, where authorities have reported more than 160 deaths among 352 sick people over four months."

--------------------------------

And just after their "mystery disease" incident! The worst thing about this, of course, is Congo now has to reset their "... days since an Ebola outbreak" calender.

Does the WHO even care anymore? "Try to contain?" How about a little confidence folks...

Unknown Disease Ravages Congo

2007-09-01T19:48:00.000Z

Here's something that's more than a little troubling...

"United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) experts have arrived in the centre of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where there has been an outbreak of an unknown but highly deadly illness that is proving to be particularly harmful for young children.

WHO said in a statement today that the exact number of cases and deaths is unknown, but the illness - which so far has no known cause - has a high mortality rate. Most sufferers experience fever, headaches, diarrhoea, vomiting and colicky abdominal pain, and more than 50 per cent of cases involve children under the age of 10.

A joint investigation team from WHO, the DRC's provincial and national health ministries and the National Institute of Biological Research (known by its French acronym INRB) has reached the source of the outbreak, in Kasai Occidental province, and taken clinical samples for laboratory testing.

WHO said it was also mobilizing support to mount an epidemiological investigation and to provide logistics, such as water, sanitation and other supplies, should they be required in any emergency response.

National health authorities in the DRC have already begun implementing measures to improve hygiene, strengthen infection controls, ensure the safety of the water supply and promote safe burial practices to try to limit the outbreak."

Marburg Hits Uganda

2007-08-04T07:07:00.000Z

While most news sources are reporting on the English Foot and Mouth Outbreak, I personally find hemorrhagic fevers to be a lot more interesting... From BBC:

"An outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus has been confirmed in Uganda's Kamwenge district by the health authorities.

Two miners have been diagnosed with the fast-spreading Ebola-like haemorrhagic fever, close to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One of them has died and about 40 other people working at Kitaka gold mine have been quarantined, officials say.

Marburg has a high fatality rate. The last reported outbreak was in Angola in 2005 when some 300 people died.

The health ministry has urged local people to report any suspicious cases.

Incubation takes up to 10 days and although the last suspected case was reported 15 days ago, there is still a risk that the disease could re-emerge.

"The last case needs to have been seen 21 days ago before we can actually say we've contained it," Sam Okware of Uganda's taskforce on haemorrhagic fevers told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

Gold miners in DR Congo have been struck by the disease in the past.

Dr Okware says it is not exactly known what causes Marburg, although birds and monkeys are suspected vectors. Rats and bats also reportedly spread the disease to humans.

"My own impression is that the source of the infection is in the mine itself - because when we went there to check, we found almost 5m birds in the mine and the situation was quite unsanitary," he said.

Early symptoms of Marburg are diarrhoea, stomach pains, nausea and vomiting, which give way to bleeding.

It is spread by the transfer of blood or other bodily fluids.

There is no cure. Infected patients need to be kept in isolation so as to prevent the spread of the virus."

-----------------------------

Marburg, of course, is a close relative to Ebola (not just "Ebola-like"). I expect this to spread fast and wide. The last stages are marked by bleeding from orifices, eyes, and even skin pores.

Life Goes On...

2007-07-19T00:59:00.000Z

And just as Quebec was getting its blue-green algae situation under control...Rabies!!

"Quebec wildlife officials say they've contained a stubborn rabies outbreak emanating from the United States, trapping it in an area around a small town along the Quebec-Vermont border.

One phase of a ground operation to trap and kill raccoons and skunks was set to end Wednesday but conservation officers will resume the effort next month in the area along the southeastern border with Vermont.

They will also drop more cookies laced with oral rabies vaccine around St-Armand, near the Quebec-Vermont border. Officers in Vermont are running a similar campaign.

Quebec natural resources spokesman Pierre Canac-Marquis says infected animals from the United States are spreading rabies into Quebec. With 50 cases of raccoon and skunk rabies reported in the first six months of 2007 in Vermont, Quebec knew it had an outbreak heading its way.

"It's really the first time we've had this kind of intense outbreak,'' Canac-Marquis said.

Wildlife officials have 700 new samples to analyze, but the ratio of animals infected has considerably improved, he said.

At the height of the outbreak, conservation officers found one-in-15 raccoons on the Quebec side of the border area had contracted the disease. Those numbers have improved to one out of 45, according to Canac-Marquis.

"So far, the results we are getting is that we were quite successful in containing the outbreak,'' he said.

Rabies, which can be fatal if left untreated in humans, attacks the nervous system and is spread from animal to animal through saliva.

No humans have been infected in the latest outbreak, said Dr. Jocelyne Sauve, public health director for the affected region.

Thousands of traps have been set in the area 85 kilometres southeast of Montreal. Some animals have been euthanized as a precaution.

The main objective is to create a barrier or eradicate the outbreak altogether so it doesn't enter more heavily populated areas, including Montreal.

Canac-Marquis says the threat to the Montreal area is very real. American studies show that the virus can spread up to 40 kilometres in a single year.

Montreal officials estimate there are as many as 50 raccoons per square kilometre on Mount Royal, the wooded park in the heart of the city. With a large number of domestic animals, officials say an outbreak in the city could be a disaster.

Quebec's first case of raccoon rabies was reported in 2006 but it could take years of operations to really get a handle on the virus, Canac-Marquis said. Quebec is following in the footsteps of Ontario, where a raccoon rabies outbreak in 1999 was stopped by 2006."

Superstrain Up for Grabs

2007-07-05T22:13:00.001Z

I can no longer maintain this blog to the degree it deserves - so I am giving posting priviliges to pretty much anyone who wants it.

Drop a comment if you want to keep the world updated on the bioterror and germwarfare fronts.

Big thanks to everyone who visits this blog and helped me out with stories and content. Keep fighting the fight!

JKS Out.

Simultaneous Measles Outbreaks in Eugene and Montreal

2007-06-05T15:49:00.000Z

Quebec already has its hands full dealing with a massive algae problem, now there's a measles outbreak in Montreal:

"The greater Montreal area has 14 confirmed cases of measles, most of them adults.

Dr. Horacio Arruda of Quebec's Health Department says 12 of the cases involve adults between the ages of 22 and 39. Arruda said at a news conference in Montreal today that the virus was likely brought into Quebec by people who were traveling.

The other two cases involved children under the age of five who hadn't been vaccinated.

Arruda says anyone who has symptoms, including red spots, fever, coughing and sneezing, must contact public health officials."

Meanwhile, Eugene, Oregon is also experiencing a measles outbreak, uhm, of... well... two people:

"Lane County Public Health officials announced Monday they have confirmed a second case of measles in Eugene.

A 21-year-old Eugene man was treated at Sacred Heart Medical Center May 26 with a fever and rash after he returned from a trip in Japan. He was diagnosed with measles.

After he arrived in Eugene May 22, he socialized with another Eugene man, also in his early 20s, public health officials said. The second man became infected May 28.

"They partied together the night the first young man arrived here from Japan," said Dr. Sarah Hendrickson with Lane County Public Health.

Betsy Meredith, a Lane County Public Health nursing supervisor, said she fears more people will come down with measles."

-----------------------------------------------------

So it looks like Japan has some hot hot measles action that our vaccinations just can't handle. I wonder if the Montreal cases originated from someone who visited Japan.

I'm just really curious as to what Lane County Public Health means when they say "socialized" and "partied"... eh? EH?!?

JAPAN!!!!!!

Updated WHO figures on H5N1

2007-06-04T18:53:00.000Z

Coming on the heels of the news that the Chinese soldier with bird flu has died, and also an Indonesian teenager has died of H5N1, the WHO has released the latest tally of Bird Flu Deaths and Cases Total by Country.

	DEATHS	CASES TOTAL
AZERBAIJAN	5	8
CAMBODIA	7	7
CHINA	16	25
DJIBOUTI	0	1
EGYPT	14	34
INDONESIA*	79	99
IRAQ	2	3
LAOS	2	2
NIGERIA	1	1
THAILAND	17	25
TURKEY	4	12
VIETNAM	42	93
TOTAL:	189	310

* - I added the latest Indonesian case (and death) into the list as it had not been added to the official WHO list.

The total deaths to cases ratio leaves us with a mortality rate of 60.967%, meaning about 6 out of every 10 bird flu cases result in death.

However, a more accurate mortality rate can be derived from averaging the mortality rate of all countries reporting H5N1 cases, which I went ahead and calculated.

The average mortality rate for the 11 countries reporting cases is 60.05%, and the median is 64% (which happens to be China, who I guess wants to be in the middle of everything)

I think the big surprise here is that there's a country out there named Djibouti. Seriously, I've never heard of it before! Here's the CIA World Factbook entry about it. Apparently it's a North African country next to Somalia that is "slightly smaller than Massachusetts."

Idiots Fightened By Protein Manipulation

2007-06-03T06:59:00.000Z

The "let's censor science" crowd is back at it again! Ok, so the study in question is pretty awesomely about making things infectious that previously weren't, but that is not the point. What is the point? I will get to that. First the background from the Washington Post:

Researchers in Germany reported yesterday that they had altered the DNA of a disease-causing bacterium to enable it to infect a species it cannot normally sicken -- a double-edged advance that experts said could deepen scientists' understanding of human diseases but could also speed the development of novel bioterrorism agents.

The change in infectiousness -- the first of its kind ever engineered from scratch -- poses no direct threat to human health, scientists said, because the microbe already causes a human disease: the food-borne illness called listeriosis.

The change allows that microbe to sicken mice, a species it has no natural capacity to infect.

Still, the work has biosecurity implications because it could, in theory, be applied in reverse, endowing a bacterium that causes a serious animal disease with an unprecedented ability to sicken people.

Several experts said they were disappointed that the report, in today's issue of the journal Cell, does not mention those implications.

Also worrisome to some is that Cell's editors did not seek outside advice on whether publication of the study would pose a security threat. Although in this case the consensus appears to be that the study would have easily passed muster, several prestigious U.S. organizations have called for such reviews when "dual use" microbiological advances are submitted for publication.

Echoing the recommendations of the National Academies, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity -- part of the National Institutes of Health -- has called for extra layers of review before the publication of research that shows how to "alter the host range . . . of a biological agent."

Emilie Marcus, Cell's editor, said she has "a somewhat dissenting opinion" about the value of such reviews. "Issues were discussed and raised" internally, she said.

------------------------------------

HEY GOVERNMENT! SCIENCE DOESN'T FUCKING WORK FOR YOU OR GIVE A SHIT WHAT YOU THINK!!!!!

In fact, Science doesn't even necessarily work for the betterment of humanity. Science is about understanding how things work. Then scientists, once they figure out how something works, publish an article about how it works.

I'd like to give a big round of applause to Emilie Marcus for rejecting outright the idea of "reviews" on what can be published in a scientific journal. I think that's what a board of editors is for. I don't think Stable Isotope Quarterly has been publishing troop positions in Iraq, and last I checked Elsevier hasn't released a "How to make weapons-grade anthrax FOR DUMMIES" book.

The pinheaded bureaucratic morons of the world think that the 400 year old tradition of free and global exchange of scientific knowledge is suddenly a bad thing because we are now FIGHTING TERROR!!!!

I think the culturing of XDR-TB is a bit more pressing biosecurity issue than the possibility that a terrorist sect will spend several years studying the protein structures of exotic animal diseases with the intention of infecting humans with them...

I mean come on, get a fucking grip people. These people make bombs out of cow shit and a briefcase. If you can't do it in a college biology lab they're not going to be messing about with it. Let the grown-ups make science progress so we can maybe figure out new ways to fight diseases other than throwing synthetic fungus at them.

Chinese Soldier Being Treated for H5N1

2007-05-30T19:05:00.000Z

From CIDRAP:

"May 29, 2007 (CIDRAP News) – A 19-year-old Chinese soldier is being treated for H5N1 avian influenza, while a woman who was diagnosed with the disease in February has left the hospital after months of treatment, according to reports from China.

China's health ministry announced the soldier's illness 3 days ago, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The soldier started having symptoms, including fever, cough, and pneumonia, on May 9 and was admitted to an army hospital on May 14, where he continued to receive treatment, China Daily reported yesterday. If his case is confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO), it will be listed as China's 25th. The country has reported 15 fatalities.

The health ministry did not say where the soldier was stationed or if he had contact with birds, China Daily reported. However, Joanna Brent, a WHO official in Beijing, said China's health ministry told the WHO the soldier was stationed in the southern province of Fujian."

-------------------------------

Fujian? Does he have Fulian-type H5N1? No, he couldn't... China denies this substrain exists! It would be nice to get the full story from China... did he come into contact with birds or not? What was he doing as a soldier? I guess they don't feel the need to flesh out such minuscule details...

Massive Beef Recall Underway in 15 US States

2007-05-17T23:05:00.000Z

Where's the beef? NewsLocale has the answer:

Fears of widespread E coli contamination forced a Michigan-based beef firm to recall over 129,000 pounds of beef, the US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service confirmed today. The massive beef recall follows an inspection by the Michigan Department of Community Health, where it identified E coli O157:H7 as the source of illness in many people recently. USDA said the recall was underway in 15 American states.

David Creek Meats of Kalamazoo, Michigan, processed the suspect beef between March 1st and April 30th this year. Beef stamped with USDA Establishment number 1947A are subject to recall and no other products are implicated.

Escherichia coli or (E. coli) is a bacterium normally found in the gut of human beings. Under normal circumstances, the bacteria play an important role in waste processing, vitamin K production, and food absorption from the large intestine.

However the E. coli strain O157:H7 is associated with a host of illnesses in man. Prime among these diseases are food poisoning, urinary tract infections, peritonitis, meningitis and septicemia.

The current recall is underway in centers where beef was distributed by Gordon Food Service. The states where the beef is being recalled include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

---------------------------------------------------

Hey everybody, you know what's a lot cheaper than massive recalls and public humiliation for a company? Installing irradiators in processing plants!

The American public could care less about dying from colon cancer by ingesting such high quantities of red meat, but are terrified of electrons and photons being shot onto their meat, which leave no residual radiation.

Oh well... maybe I can someday I can get an irradiator manufacturer to give me an interview...

Mumps Outbreak in Canada

2007-05-16T23:37:00.000Z

A couple of Mumps cases in Nova Scotia has ballooned to 300 cases in Toronto. Once again I'm left with the question, "didn't we all get a vaccine against mumps?"

Looks like North America needs its booster shots... Here's the full story from Reuters:

"TORONTO (Reuters) - Health officials have issued a warning on an outbreak of mumps that has already infected three people in Toronto and could hit hundreds more, the city's public health agency said on Wednesday.

The three confirmed cases occurred after two university students returned to Toronto from the east coast city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and passed it to one of their friends. That person then unknowingly exposed about 300 others to the virus at a busy downtown Toronto bar last week, Toronto Public Health officials said.

The health agency has issued a warning for those people to be on the lookout for signs and symptoms of the disease.

A serious mumps outbreak in Eastern Canada has prompted health officials there to look into plans for a vaccination program.

The mumps is not usually a serious illness, but it can cause meningitis, hearing loss and orchitis (inflammation of the testicles). Women who get the illness in the first three months of pregnancy can also miscarry.

The highly contagious disease has previously broken out in Eastern Canada and the U.S. Midwest.

Canada's outbreak began in Nova Scotia in February where so far 222 people have been infected. Overall, nine cases have been confirmed in Ontario."

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So, before this there was no mumps vaccination program? What the hell is the MMR good for if you don't use it? Not that it appears particularly good anyway, seeing as it seems to wear off just as you're gaining your freshman fifteen...

Now that all the old diseases are coming back, I think we should start giving them the good ol' names as well. I think we should start calling mumps "the French Canadian Disease." French Canadians can call it "the American Disease" and the British can call it "the Colonial Disease."

Now all we need is some drug-resistant syphilis and a return to Imperial rule! Weeee! Break open the scotch boys, we got some spirochetes to engineer!

FluForecast predicted high H5N1 mortality in Indonesia

2007-05-12T19:52:00.000Z

I'm still working on some statistical equations to try and predict how long until it mutates. Unfortunately, I know nearly nothing about genetics... (But I can do the stats!) Anyway, the mighty FluForcast program has shown that it's predictive powers are indeed impressive, as while the leading virologists were saying H5N1 would behave itself in 2006, FluForcast said otherwise. Here's the story from News-Medical.net:

"When H5N1 was thought to be quiescent in 2006, in a prospective open trial, FluForecast, a software program which measures virus gene proteins, predicted high human mortality H5N1 outbreaks to come.

In addition, FluForecast technology predicted that the leading country in which these outbreaks would occur would be Indonesia. Both predictions have now been found to be correct. The basis of these predictions, that unique virus structures relate quantitatively to high host mortality, has now also been demonstrated independently in laboratory experiments.

The FluForecast software program, developed by Replikins Ltd. to give advanced warning of influenza outbreaks, measures quantitatively the concentration of a new class of virus peptides, called Replikins, shown to be related to rapid replication and epidemics. FluForecast has been used to identify, or isolate 'in silico,' the area of the virus genome which contains the highest concentration of replikins; this area is now called the Replikin Peak Gene. It has now become possible to measure quantitatively the replikin concentration (Replikin Count, or number of replikins per 100 amino acids) in the Replikin Peak Gene (RPG) of all H5N1 virus isolates whose amino acid sequences are published annually in PubMed. It is now possible to determine whether the RPG gene in a given virus isolate is relatively 'quiescent' or more active, i.e. 'upregulated.'

While the Replikin Count of the whole virus had previously been found by Replikins, Ltd. to correlate with virus epidemics and outbreaks, the RPG gene, with a four-fold concentration of replikins, magnifies the differences. It is also now possible to compare the RPG in different hosts. The H5N1 virus RPG in humans has increased nine-fold from 2004 to 2006, and in 2006 was found to exceed the RPG in other hosts, eg. goose, duck and chicken. Similarly, it was possible to compare the RPG in each country, for each host. In this way it was found that the RPG upregulation in Indonesia for human H5N1 in 2006 was more than double that in Thailand and three to six times that in Japan, Russia, China and Vietnam. Thus the data in 2006 predicted both higher H5N1 human mortality rates, and that this would occur predominately in Indonesia. Both predictions have been realized in 2007.

In addition to these epidemiological studies, the hypothesis that host mortality rate can be predicted by virus Replikin Count has now been tested and confirmed in the laboratory. For each of four strains of Taura syndrome virus of shrimp, the Replikin Count was determined and compared by FluForecast. Separately, the laboratory determined blind, that is without knowledge of the order of virulence predicted by replikin analysis, the comparative actual mortality rates in shrimp achieved by each of the four virus strains. In the laboratory, these four strains were found to have increasing mortality rates in the following order: Venezuela, Hawaii, Thailand and Belize. Point-to-point linear statistically significant correlation was found between the Replikin Count and the mortality rate of each of the four strains.

Thus for two different viruses, H5N1 and Taura, acting in two different hosts, human and shrimp respectively, a quantitative correlation of virus Replikin Count and host mortality rate has been found. To our knowledge, this is the first time that this type of quantitative relationship has been demonstrated. These proof-of-concept experiments, added to those previously reported, further confirm the relationship of this new class of virus peptides, replikins, to rapid replication, to epidemics, and to mortality rates. The data also illustrates the use of FluForecast to provide advance warning of, and thus permit better control of, virus outbreaks."

------------------

Obviously a slight reworking of a Replikins Inc. Press Release, but the facts are all there. Whatever the hell replikins are they are, analysis of them is useful in predicting the epidemiology of viruses.

It also demonstrates why samples of high-path H5N1 from every country NEED TO BE SENT TO HEALTH ORGANIZATIONS!!!

New Strains of Tuberculosis Could be Used as Bioweapons

2007-05-03T05:44:00.000Z

Ok so this is a press release, but it makes the case that emerging strains of tuberculosis could be used effectively in bioterror attacks. From PR Newswire:

"BOCA RATON, Fla., May 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- It sounds crazy at first, but Dr. Kanti Daya, a credentialed, respected infectious disease specialist, believes that new strains of tuberculosis (TB) could be a devastating weapon in the hands of suicide terrorists.

"I am convinced that the absence of a viable program against tuberculosis being used a weapon compromises our state of national security," says Dr. Kanti.

Dr. Kanti isn't the only one sounding the alarm. An Interpol official warned of a bioterror threat, based on evidence from captured terrorists. And the CIA has listed TB as a potential bioterror weapon.

Despite widespread belief that tuberculosis has been conquered, deadly new outbreaks have recently been reported in England and South Africa. A recent AP article cited one man in Phoenix who has been locked up because he is infected with a "virtually untreatable" strain of tuberculosis, a strain that the WHO has been warning the public about.

"At least one-third of the world-two billion people-is infected with TB. Here in the U.S. we barely hear about these diseases, but ... we're starting to feel their impact because of immigrants," says Dr. Kanti.

Tuberculosis has been dubbed "Captain of the Men of Death," an apt sobriquet as the disease kills two million people each year-almost four people per minute.

"The disease is communicated via airborne droplets. It has no color, odor or heat content that would alert you to avoid breathing. For example, an effective infection with anthrax requires between 8,000-10,000 particles. TB infection only requires an inoculum of 2-3 particles," explains Dr. Kanti."

--------------------------------

Well, of course, 2 or 3 particles innoculating a human and causing a serious illness is a bit of a stretch, but XDR-TB does exist and it appears to be encroaching on the USA -- this is a serious matter of public health. Even worse, its quite feasible to easily procure some regular old killed-by-penicillin TB and kill culture after culture with various antibiotics until you end up with some XDR-TB. However, that scheme sounds a little too crazy and dangerous for even terrorists to attempt.

Maybe BARDA can get some people to get off their asses and come up with a real TB vaccine. That would be nice, and also maybe a mumps vaccine that actually works after you hit 20.

Which reminds me I really should get my MDaT booster...

Experimental Flu Drug Proves Effective

2007-05-01T23:49:00.000Z

From The Oregonian:

"AVI BioPharma Inc. on Tuesday said the company's experimental influenza drug proved effective against two strains of flu virus in animal studies.

Treated mice suffered less weight loss and lung injury after exposure to the viruses and were more likely to survive compared to untreated mice or those given a placebo. And virus levels were also significantly reduced in treated mice, researchers reported at the an international conference on antiviral research. The experiments were conducted at Tulane University School of Medicine and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.

AVI is developing the drug as a treatment for type A influenza viruses, including those with potential to cause pandemics. The company said it intends to evaluate its compounds in additional animal models to test their potential efficacy against the highly pathogenic bird flu, or H5N1 influenza."

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See, this is where BARDA is supposed to step in and hand AVI a wad of cash. C'mon BARDA, this is exactly what you were created for. The HHS gives money to glaxo-smith-big-pharma-phizer, and BARDA's supposed to help out the little guys with the big ideas. Step up to the plate BARDA, the more antivirals we have the better.

Peramivir Protects Lab Mice from Lethal H5N1 Injection

2007-05-01T15:46:00.000Z

Or at least so says the Press Release... I think this is some really fresh news, so consider this another SuperStrain Scoop. Or, a repost of a press release... whichever. Anyway, here's what it says via EurekaAlert:

"A St. Jude study shows intramuscular injection of peramivir for eight days protected mice from lethal H5N1 influenza virus infection and inhibited virus replication, supporting the use of this drug to control influenza during a pandemic.

The antiviral drug peramivir might offer humans significant protection during a pandemic of the avian influenza virus H5N1, according to results of mouse studies conducted by investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Peramivir, an antiviral drug, blocks the ability of influenza viruses to use an enzyme called neuraminidase, thus preventing the release of new virus particles and their spread from one infected cell to another.

The St. Jude team studied different approaches to treating infected mice according to duration of administration (one day versus eight days); route of administration of peramivir (intramuscular injections alone versus intramuscular injections followed by oral administration) and frequency of administration on the first day of treatment (once versus twice). In all cases, the investigators administered peramivir to mice one hour after nasally administering a lethal Vietnam strain of H5N1 influenza virus.

The researchers reported 100 percent survival among 10 infected mice given intramuscular injections of peramivir daily for eight days. The drug also inhibited replication of the deadly strain of H5N1 virus in the lung, brain and spleen. The key to the high survival rate was treating the infected mice within 24 hours after infection with H5N1 and continuing the treatment for eight days. In contrast, a single intramuscular injection resulted in a 40 percent survival rate, while two intramuscular injections increased the rate to 60 percent. The single intramuscular injection did not completely inhibit H5N1 virus replication in the lungs and spleen, but did decrease the spread of virus to the brain.

"Peramivir should be given as soon as H5N1 infection is suspected, since onset of symptoms in infected humans can be delayed," said David A. Boltz, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Robert G. Webster in the Infectious Diseases department at St. Jude. "The drug could also be given as a preventive measure during an outbreak to decrease the risk of infection," he said. Boltz is first author of a paper, which was presented April 30 at the 20th International Conference on Antiviral Research in Palm Springs, Calif.

"We were surprised to see a 40 percent survival rate among mice after just a single dose of peramivir," said Elena A. Govorkova, Ph.D., a scientific manager in the Infectious Diseases department at St. Jude. Govorkova is the paper’s senior author.

"Our findings support the use of peramivir during a pandemic, and we are currently studying the emergence of H5N1 variants that are resistant to this drug and may occur in the course of treatment," said Natalia A. Ilyushina, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Webster’s laboratory. Ilyushina is a co-author of the paper."

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Let the Peramivir vs. Tamiflu battle begin. Just remember though, in Indonesia the Tamiflu does nothing.

Homeopathic Pandemic Solutions

2007-04-30T19:25:00.000Z

Homeopathic medicine, in my opinion, can be very effective and has grown tremendously from its original beginnings. I recently got shot an e-mail about a research company/instutute/??? doing pandemic prevention/control research using a homeopathic approach. If they come up with anything you can be quite sure that it's far safer than heroic doses of new barely-tested antivirals.

The research institute is called Molecular Dyne, here's a little bit from their page:

"THE MDYNE MISSION

To explore, test, and refine Advanced Classical Homeopathy as it pertains to the rapid treatment and cure of epidemic diseases; To explore, design, test, and implement emergency medicinal mass production, distribution, and treatment protocols.

"THE METHODS

We deal in continued study and research for the bulk of our activities. Our affiliate lab continually pawns off other science & engineering intellectual property and capacities in restructuring for the MDyne mission. We study, study, study and practice, practice, practice with a big picture and critical emerging technology priority view to things. We try to heal sickly livestock with aggressive, experimental tactics -- sometimes killing them. What we learn there, we apply to tending to pets and humans with much greater precision. Application of our drugs is half the story. Being able to rapidly tend to patients, properly prescribe, properly redose, rapidly train field medics, rapidly produce, and rapidly distribute medicine at local, state, continental, and international levels....that's the difficult objective and nearly Impossible Mission. But, we've implemented a few things. In the meantime, we circulate around, practice our quackery to sharpen our skills, and have squashing Cancer as a hobby R&D interest which also overlaps a bit with the primary mission. "

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As it stands I'm actually very happy to hear the homeopathic medicine has started to tackle things other than "migraine relief" and "body cleansing"...

My minds pretty open, considering that the current antivirals aren't working for H5N1 and the only FDA approved vaccine for it is few notches shy of being as affective as Vitamin C.

FDA Approves First Human H5N1 Vaccine

2007-04-18T03:23:00.000Z

And by god you know damned well I'm going to get the jab! Here's the full story from Reuters:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first bird flu vaccine for people won U.S. approval on Tuesday as an interim measure in case an influenza pandemic strikes before a better immunization comes along.

The vaccine made by French company Sanofi-Aventis will not be sold commercially. It is being stockpiled by the government for use if the H5N1 bird flu virus mutates to a form that can spread easily from person to person.

The Food and Drug Administration said two injections given 28 days apart may provide "limited" protection if a pandemic occurs. About 45 percent of people who got the vaccine in a study developed an immune response to the virus.

The vaccine is "sort of an interim measure" until better ones are developed, said Norman Baylor, director of the FDA's Office of Vaccines Research and Review. Several companies are working on other versions.

"Ideally, yes, you would like a vaccine that would have a higher efficacy," Baylor told reporters.

A single shot and a lower dose also would be preferred, Baylor said. The dose needed for the new Sanofi vaccine is higher than used in the seasonal flu vaccine."

---------------------------------------------

Wow 45% protection! So with this vaccine you have about 50/50 odds of getting H5N1, and then 50/50 odds of dying from it. I assume better vaccines will be coming down the line soon -- I can see why the government is doing a "limited" stockpile of it.

Here's to millions spent on the virus too stupid to mutate after 3 years of chances!

Mysterious Outbreak of Bedbugs Throughout USA

2007-04-09T00:41:00.000Z

Apparently the bedbugs are making a comeback - and they bite! Seems like us puny primate mammals still can't outwit the invertebrates. Here's the scoop on the situation from the San Fransisco Chronicle:

"Walter has stopped hugging his friends. He is throwing out his clothes and furniture, and he rarely comes out of his Tenderloin hotel room anymore.

He's not suicidal, but darn near. He has bedbugs.

Nearly eradicated in the United States 50 years ago, resistant strains of "super" bedbugs are infesting mattresses at an alarming rate. In what's being touted as the biggest mystery in entomology, all 50 states are reporting outbreaks of the blood-sucking nocturnal critters.

Pest control companies nationwide reported a 71 percent increase in bedbug calls between 2000 and 2005. Left alone, a few bedbugs can create a colony of thousands within weeks.

"We never treated bedbugs until 2002. Now we have a dedicated bedbug crew working on this every day," said Luis Agurto, president of Pestec in San Francisco.

Agurto's arsenal includes a vacuum, steam heat to cook the bedbug eggs and targeted spraying of insecticides. It takes three, eight-hour visits and about $500 to $750 to exterminate one room. A whole house would cost closer to $5,000.

The bulk of Agurto's clients live in low-income hotels and shelters in the Tenderloin, but he's been called to five-star hotels and suburban homes in Walnut Creek.

Bedbugs have been found in moving vans, public transit seat cushions, airplanes, college dorms and even a Bay Area meditation retreat. They spread by hitching a ride on your clothes or in your luggage and crawling off to infest your home or apartment building.

Nearly 300 bedbug infestations were reported to San Francisco health officials in 2006, more than double the number in 2004. Most of the cases involved travelers discovering bedbugs in upscale hotels.

The size and shape of a lentil, bedbugs lay eggs during the day and hide in your bed, clothing and light sockets. At night, they suck your blood, leaving itchy bumps on your skin and little bloody excretions on your sheets. They don't pass diseases, but they are incredibly difficult to exterminate, even following their blood hosts who move to new apartments trying to get away.

The bedbug resurgence has sparked Web sites like bedbugger.com, where people share extermination tips, bite mark photos and counsel each other through the stigma. There are bedbug symposiums, cover stories in American Entomologist magazine and dozens of videos depicting infestations on YouTube. California just issued its first state bedbug guidelines, and New York lawmakers want to ban the sale of reconditioned mattresses after 4,600 bedbug cases were reported in 2006.

"The Laundromat near my building is packed, the tenants are in there, washing everything they own and giving each other knowing glances," said Walter, who has been battling bedbugs for five weeks and fears he will be kicked out of his Tenderloin studio and made a pariah if he reveals himself.

Lady Bug, a beagle professionally trained to sniff out bedbugs, makes regular rounds with Agurto's Pestec crew in San Francisco. On Friday, the dog inspected Tina Blade's room at the Empress Hotel in the Tenderloin, smelling the bed frame, baseboards and carpet.

To Blade's relief, Lady Bug deemed the room all clear. Blade is not among the dozen people who have had bedbug infestations in the 90-room Empress, but she has been bitten at other single-room occupancy hotels in the neighborhood.

"I'd always heard that nursery rhyme, 'Don't let the bedbugs bite,' but I never knew it was real until I moved to San Francisco," she said.

Empress manager Roberta Goodman is proactive about bedbugs. She conducts tenant meetings, keeps Pestec on call and has Lady Bug in every month to make sure the bugs are staying at bay.

"I can keep our community educated, but I can't control the guests who are coming in and out; that's why we do monthly checks," she said.

Bedbugs were nearly eradicated after World War II, when exterminators and homeowners used DDT to get rid of the pests. Experts say bedbugs are making a comeback because of increased global travel and a shift toward less-toxic pest control. As people are backing away from harsh chemicals and indoor spraying, the bugs are becoming increasingly resistant to the pesticides.

"We don't use as harsh chemicals as we used to, we don't spray mattresses with insecticide before selling them anymore, and the bugs are getting increasingly resistant to the few chemicals we have left," said public health biologist Laura Krueger, who wrote the new bedbug guidelines for the California Department of Health Services.

Nearly all exterminators use pyrethroids, which are a synthetic version of pyrethrum, the substance found in chrysanthemum flowers. But last fall, at the University of Kentucky, some of the nation's best bedbug researchers delivered some sobering news -- while they could kill bedbugs born in the lab with pyrethroids, four groups of adult bedbugs brought in from the outside were unaffected.

Because bedbugs are such a new phenomenon, people don't know what to do about them and are often unwittingly making their problem worse, said Nobugsonme, a New York woman who runs the bedbugger.com Web site to help sufferers cope.

A victim herself who wanted to remain anonymous, Nobugsonme said in a phone interview with The Chronicle that a series of pest control visits is the only way to get rid of the bugs. Moving the mattress, sleeping in the living room, using a bug fogger or moving in with a friend will only relocate the bugs, she said.

"People who throw away all their possessions and battle this for months and spend thousands on pest control only to relocate and have the bugs reappear are really traumatized," she said. "They are getting only a few hours of sleep at night, they feel itchy all the time, some go to therapy over it."

Thirty percent of people don't have skin reactions to bedbug bites, and may not notice an infestation until it has gotten out of control.

Pest control researchers are experimenting with alternatives such as steaming or freezing the bugs to death, and some New Jersey exterminators are gassing them with the termite killer Vikane.

UC Berkeley urban entomologist Vernard Lewis is trying to get grant money to build a baited bedbug trap. Bedbugs give off a distinctive odor, described as rotting coconuts, and that's probably how the males and females find each other, he said.

"If we can mimic that funk, that stink, I think we could make baits and monitor them," Lewis said.

Until the experts figure it out, bedbug sufferers will have to help each other fight back and raise awareness.

When Atlanta filmmaker Kyle Tekiela made a short bedbug film noir and put it on YouTube, he was shocked by how many people contacted him begging for help with bedbug problems.

"Students from all over the country sent me videos of their dorm rooms," Tekiela said. "This one guy did a 360 where the ceiling meets the walls and there was a three-inch band of bedbugs all the way around."

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I'd like to add here, that contrary to popular thought, DDT isn't a super-toxic death chemical. We stopped using it in the US because it has the unfortunate side-effect of thinning the eggshells of birds who have it in their system -- and this was causing a wide-spread decline in the populations of our wild birds, raptors in particular. Since we like our eagles and hawks more than we hate our ants and roaches, we stopped using it... it's just as poisonous to humans as any industrial pesticide currently on the market.

Remember, fire ants continue to spread and kill because we don't use DDT. We almost killed those bastards off too, then Silent Spring got published.

Bird Flu Kills Teens in Indonesia and Cambodia

2007-04-08T23:46:00.000Z

From Canada.com:

"JAKARTA, Indonesia — The bird flu virus racing through Asia killed a teenager in hardest-hit Indonesia and a young girl from Cambodia, both after being admitted to hospitals in serious condition, health officials said.

The 15-year-old girl from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta died late Thursday after experiencing multi-organ failure, said Sardikin Giriputro, a doctor at the facility.

“By the time she arrived, it was too late,” he said Friday.

The Cambodian child was initially suffering from high fever and diarrhea before being transferred from an eastern province to the capital Phnom Penh but she quickly got worse, the World Health Organization and health ministry officials said.

The 13-year-old developed a cough and was struggling to breathe before dying Thursday.

Bird flu has killed at least 170 people since it began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in 2003, WHO said. It remains hard for people to catch and most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds — including the two latest deaths.

But experts fear it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic that could kill millions.

Indonesia, the hardest hit country with 73 human deaths, is seen as a potential hotspot for that to happen because of its high density of poultry and people.

Health Ministry official Muhammad Nadirin said local lab tests confirmed the girl who died Thursday — apparently after coming into contact with the family’s sick pet bird — had the H5N1 virus.

Cambodia’s death was that country’s seventh — and the first in a year.

Some chickens in the girl’s village died before she became ill and she may have been exposed to the virus after preparing and eating tainted chickens, said WHO and the health ministry.

Officials have been sent to the area to see if any other villagers were displaying flu-like symptoms or had come in contact with sick or dead poultry, they said in their statement."

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Death comes quickly when Bird Flu strikes. It seems as though deaths from H5N1 run the gammut, from the very young, to teens, to people in their 30's and 40's... I haven't many reports about the elderly dying from it though. Interesting.

Winter's over and Bird Flu keeps killing. So far its kept to being very non-contagious and very deadly. The world's poultry reserves are dwindling and yet the thing is still going, unhampered, unchecked. The tell us there'll be vaccines...

This whole thing is just depressing the hell out of me. I think I'll just start posting on yellow fever in Africa. It might drop my readership but hell, at least there's resolution to those stories. H5N1 keeps eating at us, never swooping down for the kill, never making the fucking connecting mutation, and yet it still kills at least 3 people a month as far as I can tell for about 2 years now. How many bodies does it need to feed on before it goes pandemic and this story has a climax?!?

How long can the world collectively hold its breath on this thing?

Maybe the decriers are right, maybe H5N1 is just a paper tiger. Statistically minuscule, a gnat in the shadow of other killers: the Iraq War, Dengue, hell even the regular flu has killed more people this year.

I guess it's an issue of control. I can't control my government's actions in Iraq, besides through my vote and letters I write that no one reads. I can control H5N1, I can protect against it. I can be vigilant and prepared. That must be the appeal. No one wants to read about the horrors of the world that they can not contain, that they can not guard against.

And yet, H5N1 won't go away. We've kicked it up out of the depths of Southeast Asia and it just won't leave. First it killed all our birds, and now we're killing all our birds so it doesn't kill us. But its not going to kill us. There's no spark, there's no fire, there's only virus that holds the flint and refuses to use it. Its a terrorist; stays in the news, makes a few small attacks, and threatens to undermine the whole world.

I'm coming to believe that it's barely worthy of our attention. Fuck you Bird Flu - you're no black plague and you never will be. So just go the hell away!!!

European Union Gives Crucell H5N1 Vaccine Grant

2007-04-06T01:07:00.000Z

Never heard of the company before this news, but apparently they won the contract from the EU. Here's the story from Forbes.com:

"AMSTERDAM (AFX) - Dutch biotechnology company Crucell NV said it was awarded a European Commission-funded grant for the development of a pandemic flu vaccine.

The 1.7 mln eur grant, which was awarded to a consortium of nine leading universities and companies working in the field of influenza research, will finance pre-clinical and clinical testing of H5N1 vaccines.

'With a vaccine already in clinical trial based on H9N2, Crucell broadens its pandemic influenza vaccine portfolio adding another potential pandemic strain,' commented Crucell's Chief Scientific Officer Jaap Goudsmit.

Three influenza subtypes, H5, H7 and H9 have caused highly pathogenic avian influenza. Although presently most vaccine development has focused on H5N1 strains, avian H7 and H9 influenza subtypes remain a pandemic threat and have caused infection in humans in Asia and Europe since 1996, Crucell noted."

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The race is certainly on. There should be almost half a dozen "consumer-ready" H5N1 vaccines in about six months or so. There's already reports of some in existence, but until I see something from a medical journal showing they gave the vaccine to a pig then inoculated it with H5N1 and it didn't get sick will I believe any claims of efficacy. So keep me posted, New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet readers, cause I want to be one of the first to report on a successful human vaccine for H5N1.

Bangladeshis Test Positive for H5N1

2007-04-04T23:33:00.000Z

I was wrong! These guys caught the bird flu! Hopefully they pull through. Here's more from France 24 Hour News:

"Preliminary tests for bird flu were positive on four Bangladeshi workers who had been culling infected chickens in Kuwait, a medical source said on Wednesday, but they have not been officially confirmed.

This would be the first cases of bird flu affecting humans in Arab nations of the Gulf. "

The first test on the four men was positive," the source told AFP, requesting anonymity. "We have taken blood samples for a second test to reconfirm the initial results. We expect the outcome within hours.

"If the outcome is reconfirmed as positive, we will have to send blood samples to the World Health Organisation (WHO) laboratory in Cairo for a final confirmation," the source said.

Health ministry spokesman Ahmad Al-Shatti told AFP an official statement would be made on Thursday, after tests results were reviewed, as to whether the four were indeed infected.

The ministry said specimens "have been sent to the World Health Organisation (WHO) reference laboratory in Egypt for confirmation.

"These measures are in line with recommendations by WHO for guidelines for the diagnosis and announcement of bird flu cases in humans," he said. The four workers were admitted to Kuwait's infectious diseases hospital with flu-like symptoms on Tuesday. The men have been isolated in a special ward and were still at the hospital on Wednesday."

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It could still be a false-positive. If they are infected however, this will be an interesting show of the disease's virulence. We have a nice round number of patients (4), who are being treated early in, what the picture shows at least, a modern medical institution -- surely a "best-case scenario" when it comes to an H5N1 infection. The outcome of their cases will clearly illustrate how combative this disease is towards modern medicine.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm certainly rooting for the humans.

Four Bangladeshis Hospitalized With Possible Bird Flu

2007-04-04T01:01:00.000Z

Been a little lax lately, so here's some breaking news with a little more info about the H5N1 situation in Kuwait. This story comes from the Kuwait Times:

"KUWAIT: Four Bangladeshi workers who had been culling chickens infected with bird flu were admitted to hospital in Kuwait with flu-like symptoms yesterday, the health ministry said. "The four men are members of the teams combating the disease and have been involved in culling chickens. They were admitted to hospital over suspicions they might be infected," ministry spokesman Ahmad Al-Shatti told AFP. Shatti said it was not the first time that anyone had been admitted to hospital to be kept under observation for the disease.

A total of 22 people have so far been admitted to the infectious diseases hospital for monitoring before being discharged after testing negative. The spokesman said there was greater concern for the four new admissions, however, as they had been handling infected fowl. A total of 106 cases of the strain have so far been confirmed in birds.

Earlier yesterday, the health ministry said that bird flu hit a new commercial poultry farm leading to the culling of at least 200,000 more egg-laying chickens. Authorities said on Saturday that they have culled 1.5 million fowls, including 1.1 million egg-laying chickens in three commercial poultry farms in Wafra, south of Kuwait City on the Saudi border. The new culling raises the number of layer chickens culled to 1.3 million, which represents about 75 per cent of the state's total. Kuwait also has 32 million broiler chickens, for eating, but no bird flu case has been found among them.

Since the outbreak was first reported on February 25, Kuwait has slapped a total ban on the import and export of birds and closed down bird markets, as well as hundreds of shops that sell live chickens and the state's only zoo. In November 2005, Kuwait announced the first case of a bird infected with the deadly H5N1 strain - a flamingo at a seaside villa. The H5N1 strain, the most aggressive form, has killed more than 170 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and seen millions of birds destroyed. H5N1 is an avian influenza subtype with pandemic potential, since it might ultimately adapt into a strain that is contagious among humans."

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Kuwait's actions are smart and quick... I have a feeling these four will be cleared as negative for H5N1. Good thing they still have quite a few million edible chickens. It seems like if you want a sure bet for an investment, the US Poultry Industry can't be beat. Europe is running out of countries to import chickens from...

Indonesia Ready to Listen to Reason

2007-03-28T03:07:00.000Z

And by that, of course, I mean that they will resume sending samples of their H5N1 to the World Health Organization. Here's the WHO itself with the report:

"JAKARTA -- WHO welcomes the news from the Minister of Health of Indonesia, who announced at a joint news conference today that the country would resume sharing of H5N1 avian influenza virus samples “immediately”. This commitment by the Government of Indonesia follows a two-day meeting organized by WHO in Jakarta on 26-27 March 2007.

Indonesia’s Minister of Health, Siti Fadilah Supari, has focused global attention on the fact that developing countries have supplied H5N1 virus to WHO Collaborating Centres for analysis and preparation for vaccine production, but that the resulting vaccines produced by commercial companies are likely to be unavailable to developing countries such as Indonesia. She called this system “unfair.”

At the same time, withholding viruses from WHO Collaborating Centres poses a threat to global public health security and the ongoing risk assessment for influenza, conducted by WHO Collaborating Centres.

WHO Collaborating Centres perform a number of key influenza-related public health activities, including:

determining if the virus has acquired human genes or made other significant changes;
identification of potential vaccine strains;
testing to determine if the virus remains vulnerable to the recommended class of antivirals;
tracking the evolution of the virus and its geographic spread; and
updating diagnostics tests which may be necessary because the H5N1 virus, like all influenza viruses, constantly mutates.

WHO has welcomed the attention that the Minister has focused on this issue and her concern for developing country needs. In order to address these concerns and to maintain sample sharing for risk assessment, WHO organized the Jakarta 26-27 March meeting entitled “High Level Technical Meeting on Responsible Practices for Sharing Avian Influenza Viruses and Resulting Benefits”.

Experts at the meeting included representatives from approximately 20 countries which have had H5N1 animal or human outbreaks; senior scientists, including directors of WHO Collaborating Centres; and potential funders, including representatives from the Asian Development Bank and the Gates Foundation.

"We have struck a balance between the need to continue the sharing of influenza viruses for risk assessment and for vaccine development, and the need to help ensure that developing countries benefit from sharing without compromising global public health security,” said Dr David Heymann, WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases."

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Good news, until they crack the strain's DNA open and see just how nasty it is, of course. I have a strong belief that Jakartan Bird Flu is probably the worst strain in the world, Fujian-type included.

We shall see, now that the "Poultry Curtain" has fallen.

Thai Bird Flu Resistant to Drugs

2007-03-20T15:16:00.000Z

From IOL:

"Hong Kong - Scientists have found that a strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus circulating in Thailand is resistant to the flu drug amantadine, and they called for rigorous study of H5N1 strains to better treat human victims.

While the World Health Organisation has long recommended that Tamiflu be used as the first line of defence against H5N1, it said last May that a "dual therapy" combining amantadine and Tamiflu may be considered in case of an outbreak.

Yong Poovorawan, a medical professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, said an H5N1 strain in the central part of Thailand had become resistant to amantadine, casting more doubt over its use to fight the disease.

"It would be very dangerous if we don't know the sensitivity or resistance of the strain to amantadine and we use amantadine (to treat people infected with this strain of H5N1)," Yong said.

He urged more rigorous surveillance and study.

Yong and his researchers came to the latest conclusion after studying the molecular structure of the strain, which has been circulating in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam since 2004.

"We need to conduct in vitro experiments," he said, referring to experiments in a laboratory or other controlled settings.

However, he could not say how effective a dual Tamiflu-amantadine therapy may be as Thailand has not tried administering such a treatment.

Their findings were published in the March issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

There are two H5N1 strains circulating in Thailand, one in the northeast and the other in the central part of the country.

Yong identified the strain in the northeast province of Nakhon Phanom as the Fujian-like strain, which an international group of virologists said in October may start another wave of H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in Southeast Asia and Eurasia.

The Fujian-like strain was first isolated in China's southern Fujian province in 2005."

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But the Chinese government says that the Fujian-type strain doesn't exist! How could independent Thai scientists isolate it and study it? And here I was thinking China was a completely honest and open partner in the fight against H5N1...

Too bad the WHO doesn't have access to the nasty bastard thats raging in Indonesia, which in all accounts appears to be Tamiflu-resistant.

Pro-tip: Amantadine is the chemical name of the antiviral drug Symmetrel.

Top Interpol Official Warns of Bioterror Attacks

2007-03-20T01:53:00.000Z

From Gulfnews.com:

"Muscat: A top Interpol officer yesterday said that law enforcement agencies around the world should be prepared for a bioterrorist attack.

"Al Qaida could use chemical or biological weapons to perpetrate its terrorist actions," said Ronald K. Noble, Interpol Secretary General, to Gulf News on the sidelines of the Interpol Workshop on Preventing Bioterrorism, at a hotel here.

He said that the training material recovered from Al Qaida and information gathered from some of their captured operatives have convinced the world law enforcement community that the terrorist outfit has had plans to use chemical and biological weapons in their actions.

"Nobody really knows when Al Qaida will strike with chemical or biological weapons but it is just a matter of time before the terrorists believe they are ready," he said, adding that the only restraints the terrorists were facing was the technical complexity of operating them properly and effectively.

Justifying the fears of bioterrorism, Noble said: "In Iraq there have been no fewer than three chlorine bomb attacks, targeting innocent civilians, in the recent past. It is not difficult to imagine these attacks being extended from chemical to biological."

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The Interpol, of course, having much more of a reputation to uphold than pretty much any other intelligence agency besides maybe Mossad, coming out with a warning about bioterror should carry some weight.

I know the rabid left (and I am not implicating all leftist or social democratic parties or people here!) like to believe that all terrorist warnings are fictions of the Bush administration, but I think Interpol is just a tad bit removed from US politicking.

I imagine Al Queda bioterror attacks will be largely simplistic in nature - infecting water supplies and crops and such Either that or they will be fairly harmless but big and showy, which is always the terrorist's preference...

You only need a small amount of anthrax in a powder substrate to give the desired effect, I can an imagine an IUD exploding in a crowded market, only no big explosion, just a bunch of white powder everywhere. I think 1 part per 1000 anthrax to baking powder or whatever will certainly make a few people sick.

I hereby coin the term "powder bomb." You saw it in print here first, folks!

H5N1 Report Round-Up

2007-03-17T22:07:00.000Z

Hey folks! Sorry it's been a long little while since I updated. As I am a college student, the past two weeks have been midterm hell. So, you can expect another little pause near the second week of May, as well... heh.

While I have been studying and writing about a billion papers H5N1 has been pretty active. I assume you go to other sources for your bird flu news when I'm not regularly updating, and I tend to only report on fairly interesting news anyway (new infections, new deaths...), so a lot of this may be redundant...

Indonesia was going to give it's H5N1 samples to the WHO, but has recently decided that it will not do so after all, and will not share it's bird flu samples. This came a few days before the country confirmed its 65th death from H5N1.

Right, of course there's no interest to take a look at the strain that has killed the most people worldwide besides to use it for exploitative pharmaceuticals. Indonesia, your rhetoric rings hollow and your political games will only result in the death of more of your people!

Aside from Indonesia, Egypt has also confirmed new H5N1 infections. Seemingly out of the woodwork, H5N1 has also hit Laos and Kuwait. All this now in Mid-March, well out of the flu season.

In the humor section, the deputy administrator of the USDA-ARS made a fairly boneheaded statement (in a Scientific American article), referring to H5N1 entering the US via migratory fowl:

It is unlikely that a sick bird would be able to carry the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus into the United States through the Pacific and Atlantic flyways, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
"The distance may be too long for a (sick) bird to get that far," Steve Kappes, deputy administrator at the U.S. Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service, told reporters at a briefing on bird flu.

It's as if he didn't know that wild birds are CARRIERS of H5N1 and do not usually show signs of the illness or are killed by it! That would be ridiculous to assume, though, as I'm sure the administration of the USDA are very intelligent and aware of how biological and ecological systems work, as well as the current state of the bird flu situation...

Scientific American seemed to be unaware of this basic fact as well, unless this esteemed scientific journal (er, pop-sci trash) believes that a chicken in any state of health has a chance of crossing the Atlantic ocean.

Well, I hope that's made up somewhat for my hiatus in posting. My bioterror and conspiracy round-up will be sure to follow tomorrow or the next day. Its my spring break coming up this week so I'm sure I will inundate you all with biological minutiae as I have no money and thus will be bored as hell.

Take care!

China Confirms New Human H5N1 Infection

2007-03-03T19:04:00.000Z

From CBS News:

"A farmer in southeast China has contracted the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, state media reported Thursday.

Xinhua News Agency said it was China's first human case of bird flu since Jan. 10, when the government said a 37-year-old farmer in Anhui province in eastern China had contracted bird flu but had recovered.

In the latest case, in coastal Fujian province, Xinhua said a 44-year-old farmer with the surname Li was diagnosed on Feb. 18 after he developed a fever and began coughing.

Xinhua said tests by the provincial disease control and prevention center showed Li had been infected with the H5N1 virus strain and that the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the result on Feb. 27.

The report did not say whether the farmer worked with poultry or whether infected birds were found."

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China waited 12 days to report this news. Maybe in two weeks we'll get to find out whether he died or not.

Also note how amazingly detailed the report was! "Farmer has the bird flu." What farm? Was it a poultry farm???

The lack of information and delay in reporting is just a little suspect, I think. Watch this turn out to be a pig farmer.

Year of the pig, indeed!

Peanut Butter Confirmed as Source of Salmonella Outbreak

2007-02-24T17:13:00.000Z

From the magazine you can trust (when they're not reporting about physics), Scientific American:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An outbreak of salmonella food poisoning linked to peanut butter has widened to 329 people in 41 states, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

Local health officials in Illinois and Pennsylvania were checking to see if the deaths of an elderly man and an elderly woman might have been caused by the contaminated peanut butter.

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said all Peter Pan peanut butter bought since May 2006, and all of Wal-Mart Inc.'s Great Value peanut butter with the batch code 2111 should be discarded. ConAgra Foods Inc. makes both, and has recalled all potentially contaminated batches.

The company said on Thursday that tests by some states found the salmonella bacteria in peanut butter produced at its Sylvester, Georgia, plant, where its Peter Pan and Great Value brands are made.

ConAgra spokeswoman Stephanie Childs said salmonella had been detected in its peanut butter in Iowa, and in other unspecified states.

"We are truly sorry for any harm that our peanut butter products may have caused," Gary Rodkin, chief executive of ConAgra, said in a statement released on Thursday."

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When it comes to peanut butter, I've always held that its not something to skimp on. Choosy moms choose Jiff for a reason: Its not contagious! (and its the tastiest!)

I also looove how this whole thing started in Iowa. Seriously Iowa, what the fuck is going on with you guys? One more outbreak originating from you and I will officially label you "the plague state". I'll make a graphic too, and put it right above my topic cloud. You've been warned.

And please people, don't ever buy anything made by ConAgra or Sysco, it's all crap. Have a little nutritional self-respect.