New H5N1 Dog Death

From The China Post:

"A dog has died of bird flu in Azerbaijan, a country on the crossroads of Europe and Asia where three people have already died from the virus, officials said on Wednesday.

"A dead stray dog has been found, and after analysis type A bird flu was discovered. The medical investigation is continuing," said a statement from the state commission tasked with fighting the spread of bird flu. It said the dog died on March 9 in the capital Baku.

It was the first dog reported to have died of the virus in Europe, although Germany has reported that at least three cats and one stone marten have been infected. Austria has also reported cats infected with the deadly H5N1 strain on flu. The disease has hit domestic and wild birds throughout the South Caucasus state."

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Since when is Azerbaijan a European country? Wait for dogs in Greece to die or something before claiming 'first dog dead in Europe of Bird Flu.

Still, this isn't exactly good news. Hopefully we can keep our pet mammals from carrying this thing.

Denmark, Sweden Have Bird Flu

From M&C:

"Copenhagen/Stockholm - Danish authorities reported Wednesday that an 'aggressive bird flu virus strain' has been detected in a wild bird.

The find was made in a common buzzard found in a marshy area, near Naestved, some 85 kilometres south of the Danish capital, Copenhagen.

The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration (DVFA) said tests have determined that the buzzard was infected with the H5 virus, but tests were pending to determine if the strain was the H5N1 virus strain that is potentially lethal to humans.

Family and Consumer Affairs Minister Lars Barfoed said Danish authorities had been prepared for the find and had activated an action plan.

A 10-kilometre cordon zone that surrounds a three-kilometre no-go zone has been set up around the location, Per Christiansen in charge of emergency measures at the Danish Veterinary and Food Aministration said.

In accordance with recommendations issued by the European Union, the agency advised people in the area to keep their cats indoors and dogs should be on leash. The opening hours for a hotline were also extended.

Meanwhile in Sweden, the National Veterinary Institute (SVA) reported that Sweden has the H5N1 virus."

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Most are predicting H5N1 to hit the states by mid-spring. Of course, we'll be prepared with our already obsolete vaccine that hasn't even been produced yet.

Japan Unveils New Anti-Bioterror Measures

From The Japan Times Online:

"A national center for infectious disease surveillance has begun building a system aimed at detecting early signs of bioterrorism and new types of influenza based on factors that include a slight increase in the number of emergency patients, center officials said Monday.

The Infectious Disease Surveillance Center at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo is working on the surveillance system so that prompt countermeasures can be taken to prevent the spread of infections, the officials said.

Under the planned system, the center will continuously collect and analyze data of people seeking medical attention and determine that an abnormal situation has arisen in the event there are 10 or more patients in a certain region complaining of symptoms such as fever, convulsions or vomiting.

It will then dispatch a medical team to the affected region for diagnoses, decontamination and to prevent the spread of infection, the officials said.

The system would make it possible to deal with the situation several days sooner than the current state in which action is taken only after there are multiple cases of severely ill patients, they said."

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Am I the only one shocked that such a system was not already in place? Does the US have such a system? It seems like the data they are just starting to analyze should have always been considered essential information.

The Future of Biowar is Now!

... or at least so says Paul Boutin. This guy is giving the other side of the biowar/bioterror debate - the side that says the threat is very real and possibly imminent. His arguments hold more water with me than those who say the threat is largely imagined, even if his book is unfortunatly titled. Here's the story from TCS Daily (an amazing news site if you don't know about it already):

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"Since the invasion of Iraq and the collapse of Saddam Hussein's biological-weapons threat, people have breathed easier about the threat of bioterrorism and biological warfare. But recent developments suggest that this relaxation is unwarranted. Indeed, there's considerable evidence that we should be much more afraid than we are, or have been.

The first such warning comes from technology writer Paul Boutin, who recently set out to discover just how easy it would be for an amateur to create a dangerous biological weapon. The answer — as the title to his piece, "Biowar for Dummies" suggests — is "pretty easy, really." Instead of lethal genes, he inserted genes for fluorescence. Boutin writes:

I hadn't set foot in a lab since high school. Could I learn to build a bioweapon? What would I need? What would it cost? Could I set up shop without raising suspicions? And, most important[ly], would it work? . . .

Eventually, we fumble our way to a plastic dish full of translucent goop. If I'd been working on smallpox—and really committed to my cause—this would have been the part where I'd inject a lab animal with the stuff to see if it got sick. Then I'd give myself a dose and head off on a days-long, multi-airport, transnational suicide run. But it was just yeast. Set on top of a black light, it glowed an eerie bright blue, like a Jimi Hendrix poster. My creation ... lived.

Boutin's a smart guy, but he's no Dr. Evil. If he can get this far, others (more skilled, more committed, more, um, evil) can go farther, faster.

And they won't have to start from scratch. As a troubling new article in Technology Review demonstrates, they'll have a lot of old Soviet bioweapons work to build on. The story — researched and double-checked by Technology Review over a period of 14 months — suggests that there's a lot to work with. What's more, the threat isn't just the usual suspects: "weaponized" anthrax, smallpox, ebola and plague. It turns out that Soviet scientists were working, with some success, on considerably creepier stuff. We're talking about pathogens that cause the body to attack its own nervous system by generating antibodies against nerves' myelin sheaths; producing a virulent, pathogenic form of Multiple Sclerosis; or bugs that produce endorphins, keeping a population sedated, or perhaps even genuinely in love with Big Brother. And while the Soviets had to work hard to get anywhere on this kind of thing a couple of decades ago, what was hard for them is easier now."

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So, yes, all the good weaponized strains are very available on the black market, and its pretty much a certainty that all the rogue nations most likely have their own special batches. But, it is also true that biological weapons just aren't that great for mass destruction. They are economy killers, for sure, and can probably wipe out any small midwestern town in a very terrifying and horrific fasion -- but a whole country? They wish...

However, infectious MS sounds pretty fucking scary. I imagine that the "some success" mentioned about such nefarious projects is about the same level of success the soviets had with their ESP experiments. Anyone here know how possible it would be to turn someone's sclerotic antibodies into infectious agents? That would require some kind of high-level genetic virus designing, no? Wouldn't such a pathogen have to code for a protein that produces a demyelinating antigen - one that looks "human" enough to fool the body into using it?

Or, knowing the ruskies, maybe they found something they could just zap rhuematic cells with that turned them into viruses. Gamma rays, anybody??

US Goes With Indonesian H5N1 Vaccine

From Recombinomics:

"The selection of a new pandemic vaccine candidate by the United States is not a surprise. When initial results of the first candidate vaccine was announced, it was clear that H5N1 was evolving away from that target, which was a 2004 isolate from Vietnam. The Qinghai version of H5N1 was spreading rapidly in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, and further spread was anticipated.

However, an Indonesian strain has been selected as the next target. It is unlikely that a vaccine against an Indonesian isolate would offer significant protection for the Qinghai H5N1 strain of bird flu.

However, the specific examples an not publicly known. No human sequences from Indonesia have been made public. Similarly, no human isolates from China, Turkey, or Iran have been released to the public.. H5N1 is clearly evolving rapidly, suggesting several pandemic vaccines will be required because of the increasing number of genetically diverse strains that are causing fatal human infections."


So why is the US going with a vaccine that most likely won't work as well as other candidates? Is America bungling it, or are they getting a cherry deal from Indonesia? I sure hope they are wrong on the multiple vaccine front, as several vaccines would be even more of a logistic nightmare in the face of a pandemic than just one - which we still don't have the means to deliver to everyone who would need it.

It seems like the US and the rest of the world is just going through the motions...

C. Diff. is "deadliest disease" in Ohio

From The Plain Dealer:

"The number of Ohioans dying from the intestinal bacteria known as C. diff jumped fourfold between 2000 and 2005, when the aggressive infection contributed to an estimated 785 deaths, Ohio Department of Health records show.

"Stunning new data from the agency shows C. diff infections rank among the deadliest infectious diseases in the state, and the toll may be greatest in Greater Cleveland. Data for 2005 is incomplete, but nearly one-third of the confirmed victims lived in the seven-county area.

ODH began examining death certificates in January. Deaths where C. diff was a main underlying cause quadrupled statewide, but the agency also found the numbers jumped substantially higher when C. diff was recorded as a contributing cause. By that measure, C. diff-related deaths jumped 20 percent between 2004 and 2005 estimates.

A superstrain of C. diff has been blamed for scores of deaths in Canada and Britain. The antibiotic-resistant strain has been confirmed in more than a dozen states, including Ohio. But no other state has compiled data to determine the toll, said Dr. Dale Gerding, a C. diff expert at Loyola University in Chicago."

Bioterror: Hype or Threat?

Milton Leitenburg has this to say about the subject in the Delaware Online News Journal:

"The United States has spent at least $33 billion since 2002 to combat the threat of biological terrorism. The trouble is the risk that terrorists will use biological agents is being systematically and deliberately exaggerated. And the U.S. government has been using most of its money to prepare for the wrong contingency.

A pandemic flu outbreak of the kind the world witnessed in 1918-19 could kill hundreds of millions of people. The only lethal biological attack in the United States -- the anthrax mailings -- killed five. But the annual budget for combating bioterror is more than $7 billion, while Congress just passed a $3.8 billion emergency package to prepare for a flu outbreak.

The exaggeration of the bioterror threat began more than a decade ago after the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group released sarin gas in the Tokyo subways in 1995. The scaremongering has grown more acute since Sept. 11 and the mailing of anthrax-laced letters to Congress and media outlets in the fall of 2001.

Now an edifice of institutes, programs and publicists with a vested interest in hyping the bioterror threat has grown, funded by the government and by foundations."

Blah blah blah and the moron goes on and on. He seems to misunderstand the whole point of terrorism - to TERRORIZE! It has nothing to do with how many people you kill. A large-scale bioterror attack may kill only a couple hundred people at most, but that isn't the goal. The goal is to frighten a population so much as to cause the breakdown of their civilization.

The thing is, this argument can be applied to any terrorist attack. They just don't result in massive death counts. The ~3,000 who died on 9/11 was a complete fluke and that large of a number will probably never be seen again. The main thing though, is to try and make sure another terrorist attack is not seen again.

And yes, the threat of bioterror has grown. Dr. Germ was released with no charges, remember? She's free to lend her services to any group looking to employ her. As long as there's still dozens of Russian biowar strains floating around on the black market, there will be the threat of bioterror. This guy is an idiot who really has no idea about the subject he's writing on.

However, is that to say that the administration hasn't been playing on America's fears to get legislation it wants put through? Of course not, the Bushies are very keen on trumping up any and all terrorist threats: that doesn't make the threats themselves imaginary or any less dangerous to the American public. Milton has a point when he argues against the governments scaremongering, but downplaying the damage a bioterror attack would cause is just irresponsible.

PS: He also makes the whole "by talking about bioweapons we are giving our enemies ideas" talking point later in the article. What a deuchebag.

Chemotherapy for H5N1?

I snagged this off of MedPage Today:

"Chemotherapy for Immune Disorder Suggested as Avian Flu Treatment:

STOCKHOLM, March 2 - A chemotherapy regimen used to treat an immune system disorder might increase survival of people who contract the H5N1 avian influenza virus, Swedish and Chinese researchers have suggested.

The hypothesis, proposed in the March 2 online issue of The Lancet, is based on clinical similarities between hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) and post-mortem findings in people who have died of H5N1 infection.

The idea has yet to be tested and "might seem to be a substantial jump in therapeutic thinking," conceded Jan-Inge Henter, M.D., of the Karolinska Institute here.

But, he and colleagues argued, a combination of cytotoxic therapy used to treat HLH combined with antiviral and supportive therapy "is worth considering," especially since the mortality rate for people who catch the H5N1 virus is about 50%.

The hypothesis requires testing, but could be immediately ethically justified in patients with H5N1 combined with secondary HLH, they wrote.

HLH is characterized by an excess of both histiocytes and lymphocytes. The disease is associated with hypercytokinemia, cytopenia and acute encephalitis. The cause of death in HLH patients is often sepsis with multi-organ failure."

Alright, I have to admit that the headline made me laugh when I read it. Chemo for the flu is kind of like using an elephant gun to kill a spider. But reading the article I realize its a really nifty idea the way it came about. Not to mention, if it works than thats actually really cool. Instead of just watching people die who fail to respond to Tamiflu, doctors can try at least try something else. Although, I'm not quite sure how easy it is to get chemo done in the places where most people are dying from H5N1.

All in all, new pathological findings are always good.