Biology Archive
President Warns Of Holiday Food Dangers...12/12/99
(CNN) President Clinton said Saturday that new safety measures for eggs on the farm and in the packing plant will greatly reduce the number of cases of potentially deadly salmonella. "Food safety is part of our citizens' basic contract with the government. Any food that fails to meet clear and strict standards for safety should not make it to the marketplace," Clinton said in his weekly radio address. "It's just that simple."
Mysterious Disease Killing Lobsters...12/10/99
HUNTINGTON, N.Y. (AP) - Late last summer, lobstermen like Pete Lauda started noticing that their catches were either dead or dying before they even got back to the dock. By November, catch rates had plummeted 90%, fueling fears that the nation's No. 3 lobster market may be completely wiped out. Marine biologists think a disease caused by a parasite is to blame. All Lauda and more than 1,300 fellow lobstermen on both sides of Long Island Sound know is that they need help - and they need it fast.
Update: Gulf War, Brain Damage Linked...12/01/99
CHICAGO (AP) - Brain scans of soldiers who believe they suffer from Gulf War illness suggest they have brain damage, possibly from chemicals they were exposed to during the conflict, researchers reported Tuesday. The researchers said veterans who report symptoms of the illness had lower levels of a certain brain chemical than healthy veterans of the 1991 conflict. "They can be believed - they're not malingering, they're not depressed, they're not stressed. There's a hope for treatment and there's hope for being able to monitor the progress of the disease," said the lead researcher, Dr. James L. Fleckenstein, professor of radiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said he looked forward to examining the research. "I hope he's right" that chemical exposure is the answer, Quigley said. "We need to take a look at it.
"CHEMTRAILS" Continue To Baffle, Sicken Americans...11/24/99
Exactly one year after Americans in 48 states began noticing an abrupt increase in unusual aerial activity and sickness on the ground, "flu-like" ailments are once again up sharply as eyewitnesses describe multiple broad white plumes being laid by tanker-type aircraft in Xs and grid patterns over the U.S. and central and western Canada.
Unlike normal contrails formed when icy water vapor condenses around hot engines at high altitudes, "chemtrails" do not dissipate quickly, but broaden for hours, turning clear blue skies into hazy overcast - even in areas remote from heavily trafficked air routes.
Thousands of photographs and hours of amateur videotape show
dozens of criss-crossing chemtrails over small towns unused to jet traffic.
Commercial jetliners flying above other lingering plumes often leave no contrails,
or trail a characteristic pencil-thin scrawl that fades in less than a minute
like the wake behind a boat. "The Air Force doesn't do anything that emits anything
other than a normal contrail, which is vapor," U.S. Air Force spokeswoman Margaret
Gidding told Spokane's
Air Force planes routinely jettison JP-8 to lower aircraft weight for safe landings. A U.S. Air Force study - "Weather as A Force Multiplier: Owning The Weather In 2025" - also describes how jet tankers are deployed to spray chemicals that form "cirrus shields" capable of hiding aerial activity from observers on the ground. Other USAF weather modification techniques spread carbon black to heat up the atmosphere.
On November 18, 1999 residents of Espanola, Ontario went before the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa to complain of widespread illness over a 50 mile area following months of spraying by KC-135 and C-130 aircraft. Tests conducted by the Ontario Ministry of Environment found carbon black in the fallout, as well as "chaff" used to jam radar signals - or track airborne dispersion patterns. But airborne pathogens are not used to modify the weather.
Two Congressional investigations and recently declassified British defense documents detail 50 years of "open air" testing that used ships and spray-equipped aircraft to spread biological warfare simulants on hundreds of cities across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Americans urged to call special 1-800 "flu" and "migraine" tracking numbers may be taking part in a biowarfare experiment. Tests done in 1998 and 1999 by government-licensed laboratories on cobweb-like filaments, gel-like material and a red powder dropped over porches, power lines and patrol cars in Washington state, California, Oklahoma, Idaho, Michigan, Espanola and Pennsylvania have identified various pathogens, including bacilli and toxic molds capable of producing acute upper respiratory and gastrointestinal distress.
Last winter, patients flooded emergency rooms across the U.S. at up to double the rates usually seen in peak flu season. Often degenerating into double-pneumonia or asthma, their severe "flu-like" symptoms lingered for months.
This November, Americans in heavily sprayed areas are also complaining of extremely severe headaches, stiff necks and joint pain. One mother whose white blood count is down by half says, "I live in a rural community and most of these people work outside and have their whole lives and have never experienced these kind of symptoms till the contrails started showing up last fall. We live in no flight area, yet it is not uncommon for us to see up to 50 contrails a day...flying the multiple line pattern and the X pattern." Referring to the resulting illness, she added, "Not just the usual sicknesses...ones that doctors have no idea what is causing them and have no cure for. We had two children die here from totally unexplained illnesses when the contrails were flying all the time. We have dead birds in our yards...we have dead animals. The livestock are sick. Suddenly last winter my nine year old daughter came down with an asthma problem out of the blue. My uncle died of respiratory problem, again, out of the blue."
On November 20, 1999, a nationwide Chemtrails Protest was held in Times Square and cities across America calling for an end to the aerial spraying and full disclosure by responsible government agencies.
India Fighting Brain Fever Outbreak...11/23/99
HYDERABAD, India (AP) - Hundreds of pigs have been slaughtered in southern India to fight an outbreak of brain fever that has killed 138 children in a month, officials said Tuesday. At least 660 other children are suffering from Japanese encephalitis in government hospitals across the state of Andhra Pradesh, but the outbreak has been controlled, said the state health minister, S. Aruna. Aruna said thousands of doses of vaccine have been administered in the affected areas. Doctors say pigs carry the encephalitis virus, which is spread to humans by mosquitoes. Children are most vulnerable, and hundreds die in India each year.
Pesticide Mist Forces Evacuations...11/15/99
EARLIMART, Calif. (AP) - Mist from a weed-killing pesticide blew into this small San Joaquin Valley town, forcing 150 people to evacuate their homes and sending dozens to the hospital. Twenty-nine people went to hospitals Saturday night complaining of nausea, vomiting, headaches, burning eyes and shortness of breath from exposure to metam sodium, Tulare County Sheriff's officials said Sunday. Hospital officials said all were treated and released. Residents were not allowed back into their homes until about 11:30 p.m., some six hours after the leak occurred. Growers had contracted Shafter-based Wilbur-Ellis Company to spray the chemical, commonly known as Sectagon 42, to the field using sprinklers. "It was applied per the directions so I'm not sure how it ended up coming back into town," said Tulare County Fire Capt. Patricia Granillo.
Epidemic Threat looms 11 Days After India Cyclone...11/09/99
Masked rescue workers were struggling to clear mounds of bloated corpses 11 days after a fierce cyclone in India, and the Red Cross estimated Tuesday that 10,000 people had died -- far more than Indian authorities were reporting. A Red Cross disaster expert said the official death figure of 3,426 seemed inaccurate because thousands of bodies were cremated or buried by relatives or neighbors before official help arrived.
"We've been as sensible as possible with the figures," said Francis. He said more than 10 million were estimated to have lost their homes, livestock or livelihood.
"When you come across stories of 20 people left out of a village of 170, it clocks up pretty fast," Francis said. Many people were dying of starvation apart from gastroenteritis, he said.
New Choices In Flu Treatment...10/29/99
(CNN) -- Treating the flu may now be as easy as taking a pill, but it is a pill that has to be taken every day for six weeks in order to work. The FDA approved the drug, Tamiflu, Wednesday. Tamiflu, generically known as oseltamivir, is the second in a new class of flu drugs that will hit the market this year. A similar flu drug, called Relenza, was approved for marketing in July. The flu is one of the oldest and most infectious diseases worldwide. Even though it can be prevented with a vaccine, it kills an average of 20,000 Americans each year. The medical community is hoping the introduction of new drugs will make this year different. A study in this week's New England Journal of Medicine shows Tamiflu can help most people avoid the flu.
New Flu Strain Could Kill Millions...10/28/99
A NEW strain of flu - believed to have started in pigs - could kill millions, experts warned yesterday. An international team of scientists are focusing on the new type of Hong Kong flu. Alarm bells sounded after a 10-month-old girl was admitted to the city's Tuen Mun hospital in September. Although she recovered, the virus bore the molecular hallmarks of a known pig strain. Pigs were thought to have started the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which lead to the deaths of an estimated 20million people around the world.
Alan Hay, of the World Health Organisation's influenza collaborating centre at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said: "We're monitoring the case very carefully. "It's at quite a preliminary stage." Most influenza strains are variants of known viruses that can be controlled with readily available vaccines.
But every few decades a radically different type appears. Virologists at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, are helping the WHO team study samples of the virus taken from the girl.
The last major outbreaks occurred in 1957 and 1968. Two years ago Hong Kong was the centre of an influenza scare when a strain of the virus that normally affects chickens struck 18 people and killed six.
ATLANTA (AP) - A group of federal health officials is recommending that colleges make meningitis vaccines readily available and that they warn students of the risks of the disease. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel stopped short Wednesday of recommending that all college students be vaccinated. The advisory committee didn't go further in its recommendations because current meningitis vaccines are no more than 90% effective and don't work on all strains, said Dr. Nancy Rosenstein of the CDC's meningitis branch. "College freshmen have proven statistically to be at a moderately higher risk for meningococcal diseases and are a prime group for intervention," Rosenstein said.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The FDA will hold unusual meetings around the country this fall to hear what Americans think about bioengineered food. Buoyed by a backlash in Europe and elsewhere, U.S. critics have increased demands that bioengineered foods be labeled here. Two U.S. baby-food makers even announced they no longer would use biotech ingredients. Health experts insist biotech foods now sold are safe. They already are used widely, from the soybeans and corn of tortilla chips and soft drinks to tomatoes stewed into spaghetti sauce.
TULSA, Okla. (AP) - Seven people have fallen ill from an outbreak of E. coli poisoning in Oklahoma, most of them children, health authorities said Monday. Six of the confirmed cases were traced to unpasteurized apple cider marketed in the Tulsa area, officials said. Five children fell ill last week, and two cases have since been confirmed, said Dr. Mike Crutcher, state epidemiologist with the Oklahoma Health Department. One was an adult who drank cider from Livesay Orchards, as did five children who became ill, authorities said. The other was a13-year-old girl, and authorities are unsure how she may have been poisoned.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - The encephalitis virus that has killed six people and infected 55 others in the New York City area has been found in a dead bird 150 miles north of Manhattan. State Health Department officials, however, said Friday the risk of upstate residents contracting the West Nile-like virus is minimal. No human encephalitis cases have been reported upstate. The virus, which is carried by mosquitoes, was found in a dead crow collected earlier this month in the Saratoga County village of Ballston Spa and in a cuckoo found at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, 40 miles north of Manhattan. Officials urged upstate residents to take precautions against mosquito bites until freezing weather further decimates the bug population
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The CIA is investigating whether a recent outbreak of West Nile-like fever in New York might have been an attempt at bio-terrorism, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday. The virus, which killed five people and made at least 27 others ill, is believed to have been passed to people via mosquitoes that bit infected birds. Without quoting anyone directly at the Central Intelligence Agency, the magazine describes analysts there as having a "whiff of concern" that it might have been sent deliberately to the United States. Many experts have been warning for years that the United States is vulnerable to a bio-terrorism attack. But none has ever named West Nile as one of the potential weapons -- anthrax, botulin toxin and even bubonic plague are considered to be the potential weapons of choice. West Nile virus is not particularly deadly and causes only mild flu-like symptoms in most people. The very young, very old or ill can develop encephalitis -- a swelling of the brain -- and die. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said 50 potential or definite cases of West Nile-like fever had been identified in New York and said the outbreak was definitely on the wane. No new cases have been reported since Sept. 17. But the report in The New Yorker said the CDC had been asked to check on whether the virus could have been deliberately spread. "We're taking it seriously. We'll see where the data take us," the magazine quoted "a person at the CDC" as saying. Navy Secretary Richard Danzig told the magazine he was not alarmed. "Even if you suspect biological terrorism, it's hard to prove," he said. The magazine cites a book written by a man using the name Mikhael Ramadan, whoclaimed to be an Iraqi defector and said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was planning to make a weapon out of a strain of West Nile virus. He described it as being "capable of destroying 97 percent of all life in an urban environment." The CDC has said it is concerned about the New York outbreak because West Nile fever has never been seen in the Americas before. It is common in Africa and Asia. Last year, U.S. and Romanian experts reported in The Lancet medical journal that a 1996 outbreak in Romania had been identified as West Nile fever, with a mortality rate of between 4 and 8 percent. They said Europe was vulnerable to more such outbreaks. Last week, Thomas Briese and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine said they had identified the New York virus as a Kunjin/West Nile-like flavivirus.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Too few adults get flu shots or a vital vaccination against bacterial pneumonia, say health officials who warn that both diseases kill tens of thousands of Americans annually - a growing but preventable menace if only people were immunized. "Don't wait for your doctor to recommend vaccination - be proactive and ask for the shots," Dr. Walter Orenstein, vaccine chief for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, advised Thursday. Vaccines against both flu and pneumonia are free for Medicare patients - those most at risk - yet one-third of such patients don't get regular flu shots.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Antarctic ozone "hole" is smaller than last year, NASA scientists reported Wednesday. The hole, actually an area of depleted ozone concentration high in the atmosphere, remains very large, however, said researcher Richard McPeters. Satellite data show the depleted area stretched 9.8 million square miles Sept. 15. The record area of Antarctic ozone depletion of 10.5 million square miles was set Sept. 19, 1998. Ozone in the upper atmosphere forms a protective layer, helping block dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Environmentalists fear the depletion could spread to other areas, leading to more skin cancer and other problems.
PARIS (AP) - French firefighters and soldiers began clearing tons of dead fish Saturday from a length of the Marne River that became polluted during a heavy rainfall and the champagne harvest, police said. The stretch begins in the heart of the Champagne region in eastern France and continues for 20 miles. Police said that organic waste from the week's champagne harvests and excessive rainfall had asphyxiated nearly 100 tons of fish. Local firefighters, who began working to clear the dead fish from the water Saturday, had to call in 30 soldiers for additional help.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Top military commanders told Congress Thursday that the mandatory program to inoculate soldiers with an anthrax vaccine is imperative because several nations are developing the biological weapon for use in battle. Defense Secretary William Cohen last year ordered all 2.4 million active duty and reserve troops to get the anthrax vaccine as protection against biological warfare. Some 340,000 service members have been immunized so far. About 220 troops have refused to take it because of questions about its safety and efficacy. Symptoms reported after the shots have included fever, dizziness, blackouts and joint and muscle pain. "There are 10 countries in this world that have already taken the steps to put anthrax in a bomb or a missile," Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre testified before the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee.
NEW YORK (AP) - Federal health officials were testing dead birds from Maryland to Florida to see if the encephalitis virus that killed five people in New York has spread south in migrating birds. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected blood samples, mostly from crows. No sign of encephalitis has been found in birds south of New York. Mosquitoes have spread the West Nile strain of the virus from infected birds to humans. Thirty-seven people in the New York City area have tested positive for the virus, while 162 other cases are being investigated. Health officials have found crows in New York City infected with the virus. Twenty dead birds at the Bronx Zoo, including an American bald eagle, also tested positive. In Connecticut, the virus has been found in mosquitoes and a dead bird but not in humans.
NEW YORK (AP) - A strain of encephalitis never before reported in the Western Hemisphere - not the St. Louis strain blamed earlier - has caused four deaths and sickened 33 people in the city and its suburbs, federal health officials said Monday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reclassified the cases as West Nile-like fever, a mosquito-borne ailment whose symptoms are similar to those of St. Louis encephalitis but generally milder. The two viruses are easily confused in laboratory tests, officials said. Scientists are re-examining 174 more cases, including eight fatalities, to see if they also were caused by the new strain. "This is a question of two very, very rare diseases, and there was just some confusion about it," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said.
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) - Huge cranes tower over a ship to unload its cargo from Asia onto awaiting trucks. And from a hole in the stern, water spouts into the Pacific. The water, called ballast, comes from thousands of miles away. It was scooped up off foreign shores to help stabilize the ship for its ocean journey. The problem is that it can contain a stew of alien creatures - crabs, clams, worms, sea squirts, you name it - that would never make it this far on their own. These invaders arrive every day here at the nation's busiest harbor and at ports around the country. Once here, they sometimes explode in numbers, crowd out native marine animals, dramatically alter habitats and threaten fisheries.
(CNN) -- Health officials have identified a strain of encephalitis never before seen in the Western Hemisphere in several bird specimens found in the metropolitan New York area. The discovery of this new strain, known as the West Nile virus, has raised questions about whether 18 recently reported cases of encephalitis stem from the St. Louis variety of the virus or the new one.
The West Nile virus is an arbovirus closely related to the St. Louis encephalitis, but usually causes a milder form of the disease in humans. Both viruses are transmitted through the bite of a mosquito infected by feeding on an infected bird. Symptoms in the two viruses can be similar with victims experiencing fever, headaches, muscle weakness, and disorientation.
The similarities are so acute, said Westchester County Health Commissioner Harold Adel, that West Nile is sometimes called "Old World St. Louis encephalitis." "The connection between the infections of these birds and human cases of CDC-confirmed St. Louis encephalitis is being investigated by the Centers for Disease Control and we expect to learn more information in coming days," said New York City Health Commissioner Neal L. Cohen in a statement. Further CDC tests should determine whether patients diagnosed with St. Louis encephalitis are actually carrying the West Nile strain.
ATLANTA (AP) - The immunization rate among America's toddlers climbed to an all-time high of 80.6% last year, the government said Thursday. The rate is the percentage of youngsters 19 months to 35 months old who have had the complete series of recommended vaccinations for diphtheria/tetanus, polio and measles. The diphtheria/tetanus vaccine is given in four shots, while polio vaccine is administered in three doses. The immunization rate has been steadily climbing since 1995, when it was 76.2%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
GREENWICH, Conn. (AP) - Mosquitoes infected with the St. Louis encephalitis virus were discovered here Tuesday and a third case of the virus was confirmed in an adjacent county in New York. Officials in both states announced plans to begin spraying the areas Thursday.
In Connecticut, officials found the virus in mosquitoes trapped on a Greenwich golf course. The virus was also found in the brain of a dead crow removed from a home in Westport. An infected mosquito transmits the virus to humans by first biting an infected bird. Encephalitis, an infection of the brain and spinal cord, is characterized by high fever, coma and convulsions. It has killed three people in New York City since late August and spraying there has been underway since early September.
ATLANTA (AP) - As school nurses begin tousling youngsters' hair in their annual searches for head lice, and unlucky parents massage in chemicals and slowly pick the tiny insects from infested strands, there is a spreading fear that lice may be growing resistant to common treatments. "It is becoming a great concern to CDC and researchers throughout the United States," said Sue Partridge of the Centers for Disease Control's Division of Parasitic Diseases. Only a few scientific studies have found evidence of lice that are resistant to the over-the-counter chemicals used for years to effectively wipe out infestations. But parents like Randy Foster of Decatur, Ga., who used a lice-killing shampoo for six weeks on her 3-year-old daughter's hair with nothing but frustration to show for it, have little doubt about the insects' ability to survive
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) - The number of people with symptoms linked to an Illinois E. coli outbreak has reached 313, authorities said. Twenty-two people have been hospitalized. One remained in critical condition Wednesday. Of those with symptoms, 44 have been tested and confirmed as having E. coli, the state Public Health Department said. Most of the people apparently were exposed to the bacteria at a party held Labor Day weekend in a cow pasture near Petersburg, about 25 miles northwest of Springfield. About 1,800 people attended the event. The source of the E. coli contamination is still unknown. The health department has conducted more than 600 interviews so far
NEW YORK (AP) - Two more cases of potentially deadly encephalitis were reported Monday as the city's battle against virus-carrying mosquitoes continued with additional aerial and ground spraying. The new illnesses bring the total number of confirmed cases of St. Louis encephalitis to 11, including three deaths. The latest cases, a 15-year-old who has been hospitalized and a 38-year-old who health officials say appears to have recovered, are significantly younger than those previously infected. "Until now, the youngest person who had a confirmed case was 58 years old," said city Health Department director Neal Cohen. "Younger people, given stronger immune response generally have milder forms of the illness."
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Forty-two people in Georgia's capital Tbilisi have been hospitalized after being infected with the anthrax bacteria over the last month, the Health Ministry in the former Soviet republic said Wednesday. The government doesn't have enough vaccine to fully protect the population, and the potentially deadly disease could spread further, Health Ministry spokesman Dzhoni Dzhanashiya said. Many people have stopped buying beef in Tbilisi markets because the disease was detected among cattle in several Georgian regions, Dzhanashiya said.
The bacteria that causes anthrax is common among livestock and can be transferred to people. It can cause skin lesions, ulcers and respiratory difficulty, among other symptoms. The fatality rate of anthrax varies widely according to how the bacteria is transmitted.
NEW YORK (AP) -- As the city prepared to complete the first round of aerial and ground spraying to combat mosquito-borne encephalitis, two more cases of the potentially deadly disease were confirmed. The latest cases, a 15-year-old boy who has been hospitalized and a 38-year-old woman who health officials say appears to have recovered, bring the total number of confirmed cases to 11. Three of those have died. "Until now, the youngest person who had a confirmed case was 58 years old," said city Health Department director Neal Cohen. "Younger people, given stronger immune response, generally have milder forms of the illness." The city is awaiting lab results for 65 other people who may have been infected with the St. Louis strain, including a 79-year-old woman who died Saturday in the Queens borough. St. Louis encephalitis can cause seizure, paralysis and swelling of the brain that is sometimes fatal, especially to infants, the elderly and people with immune deficiency. Its symptoms include fever, headache and lethargy.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - People in and around Louisiana's capital are being warned to wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts and insect repellent because Eastern equine encephalitis, the disease's deadliest strain, has shown up in the area's mosquitoes. Although only two people have been infected and both recovered, Eastern equine encephalitis kills 30% to 60% of the people it strikes, according to Dr. Jerome Goddard, medical entomologist for the Mississippi Department of Health. The outbreak has killed dozens of horses and emus in Louisiana, and officials are trying to contain the disease by spraying pesticides by plane. Eastern equine is the worst form of mosquito-borne encephalitis in North America. The St. Louis strain, which has killed three people in New York City in the past month, generally kills 3% to 20% of its victims, Goddard said.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Already battered by low corn and soybean prices, farmers now fear the loss of overseas markets for the genetically altered crops that now make up a hefty percentage of U.S. production. Europeans were the first to balk at buying biotech crops, which wary Britons have dubbed "Frankenfoods." Now the baby-food makers Gerber and H.J. Heinz are turning them down, as are two Japanese brewers. In Mexico, a major tortilla maker is avoiding altered corn. One U.S. processor has announced plans to pay a premium for conventional grain, while another company has told its suppliers to start separately storing conventional and biotech grain.
NEW YORK (AP) - A fourth death is being investigated in an outbreak of mosquito-borne encephalitis that had workers spraying insecticide across the city Sunday, including in Central Park. A 79-year-old woman who died Saturday was among 10 new suspected cases of St. Louis encephalitis, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Sunday. Blood samples from all 10 are being sent to a Centers for Disease Control lab in Denver for testing and at least 80 other potential cases are under investigation. Health officials have confirmed nine cases of St. Louis encephalitis in New York City, including three deaths - one in Brooklyn and two in Queens. The woman who died Saturday was also from Queens.
KINSHASA, Congo (AP) - Eight people have died of a deadly hemorrhagic fever in northeastern Congo in what may be a resurgence of an Ebola-like outbreak in May, the government's health minister announced Friday. The eight victims all contracted the disease in Durba, about 400 miles northeast of Kisangani and the site of the May outbreak of Marburg fever. Hemorrhagic fevers, which are caused by the Ebola and Marburg viruses, among others, cause high body temperatures and bleeding and are extremely deadly. While testing is still underway, health authorities believe the current cases are a resurgence of the Marburg fever that killed more than 60 people.
PETERSBURG, Ill. (AP) - E. coli bacteria linked to a cow-pasture party has sickened more than 200 people, and the numbers are continuing to rise, health officials said Sunday. More than 1,800 people attended the Sept. 4 party. E. coli typically has an incubation period of three to eight days, but can take longer. Officials have not pinpointed the source of the potentially fatal strain of E. coli, found in the feces and intestines of cattle. Twenty people have been hospitalized, but none of the reported illnesses was considered serious, said Thomas Schafer, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Public Health. The pasture's owner, Tom Baird, said he cleaned it of manure before the party.
(NBC) ALBANY, N.Y., — The largest E. coli outbreak in state history — and possibly one of the worst nationally — has sickened nearly 500 people who believe they were infected after attending a county fair 35 miles north of Albany. At least 497 people are suspected to have E. coli and 51 people were being treated at area hospitals. Thursday, Investigaters from the Centers for Disease Control and the New York State Health Department combed the Washington County fairground searching for clues to the massive outbreak of E. coli poisoning. In the Albany area, eight children have developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, as a result of the contamination and were listed in serious condition, said Kristine Smith of the state Department of Health. HUS attacks the blood cells and can result in kidney failure. Five of the children were on kidney dialysis. Wayne and Lori Aldrich took their daughters Calley and Rachel to the Washington County Fair a week and a half ago. Now Calley is on dialysis, because of kidney damage from the E. coli infection. Rachel, 3, died Saturday Rachel Aldrich, 3, on the left, died from E. coli poisoning and her sister, Calley Aldrich is on dialysis. “Today she was going to be 4 and she wanted a Little Mermaid bike. And now I don’t even want to see those things because it hurts so much.” Rachel’s father, Wayne said. The medical detectives are concentrating on the water at the fairgrounds. It comes from six different wells and lab tests show at least one of the wells is contaminated, probably with runoff from a nearby cattle farm.
(MSNBC) ATLANTA, Sept. 2 — The United States has all but stamped out measles, recording only 100 cases last year — the lowest number since authorities began tracking the disease nationwide in 1912 — with most of the infections brought into the country from abroad, the government said Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said all but 29 of those cases involved, directly or indirectly, people who became infected in other countries.
THE NUMBERS suggest that measles has joined the ranks of smallpox, polio, diphtheria and other diseases that have been effectively wiped out in the United States. “We do have some limited transmission of measles in the United States, but we think that all the transmission is related to importation of measles virus from other countries,” said Dr. Mark Papania, acting chief of measles elimination activity in the CDC’s National Immunization Program.
There were only six measles outbreaks last year, the fewest ever reported to the CDC. The biggest outbreak occurred in Alaska after a 4-year-old unvaccinated Japanese child visiting Anchorage was diagnosed with measles. Papania said the 33 cases were the largest outbreak since 1996.
The Worldwatch Report-By Brian Halweil
Responding to widespread consumer aversion to genetically engineered foods, two of the world's three largest food companies — Nestle and Unilever — have agreed to phase out sales in the United Kingdom of products made with genetically engineered ingredients. Most major food retailers in the U.K. and Europe, including Cadbury, Sainsbury, Safeway, France's Carrefour, Spain's Pryca and Italy's Migros, have pledged to eliminate such ingredients from their brands in recent months. Public concern about possible adverse health effects from eating transgenic foods has been building in Europe for several years, encouraged by a strong grassroots movement against genetic engineering and a distrust of food safety measures that has persisted since the mad-cow scare two years ago. But consumer opposition swelled to unprecedented levels in February, 1999, when an international group of scientists validated earlier research showing that rats raised on a modified potato variety — not commercially grown at present — suffered from shrunken internal organs and suppressed immune function.
BERLIN (AP) - Security guards with dogs patrolled outside a Berlin hospital Thursday as doctors inside - outfitted in astronaut-like protective clothing - waited to find out if a man quarantined there has the deadly Ebola virus. Doctors fear the 40-year-old German cameraman could have contracted the highly contagious virus or a related disease while on a research trip to West Africa. He was disoriented and suffering from kidney and liver damage, a hospital spokesman said. Meanwhile, the biologist who accompanied the sick man to the Ivory Coast was quarantined in the east German city of Jena. The Bild newspaper reported that the sick man's wife had also been restricted to her home near Frankfurt/Oder and would not be permitted to leave the property. Neither she nor the biologist have symptoms of the illness, the report said. picion of
LINCOLN, England (AP) - Police arrested environmental protesters Saturday on suspicion of damaging crops at a farm growing genetically modified corn. Police said there were no injuries and described the protest as "essentially peaceful," apart from the crop damage at a farm in Glentham, Lincolnshire, 125 miles north of London. A police spokesman said up to 34 protesters were arrested. Genetically modified crops are plants whose genes are manipulated in order to produce characteristics such as resistance to pests. Genetically modified foods, hotly debated in Britain, have found mixed support among the public.
MOSCOW (AP) - A mysterious viral infection that has killed six people in the Rostov region in southern Russia is most likely a form of hemorrhagic fever, a top health official said Sunday. Dr. Gennady Onishenko, Russia's senior public health official, told Echo Moscow radio that the sixth victim died Saturday night. The unknown viral infection is most likely the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, Onishenko said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. He said the disease belongs to a type of low-contagious infection and that only 81 people out of the 11,000 people living in the village where the outbreak was reported have caught it. Of the victims, 50 were preparing to leave the hospital, Onishenko said.
ATLANTA (AP) - Federal health officials are urging older tourists to consult a doctor before traveling this summer to Alaska and the Yukon, where a flu outbreak has sickened hundreds of tourists for the second straight year. A total of 428 cases have been reported among tourists on seven cruises since May 22, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. That's about 4% of 10,110 passengers who got sick. Those most vulnerable - people over age 65 or with chronic respiratory and heart problems - should get advice from a doctor before traveling to the region, the CDC said
DALLAS (AP) - Soldiers born with low levels of an enzyme that helps the body fight off chemical toxins are more likely to report symptoms of Gulf War syndrome than soldiers born with normal levels, a new study has found. The authors say the small-scale study of 46 Gulf War veterans is the first to suggest a genetic marker to explain why some soldiers got sick from possible exposure to toxic nerve agents, possibly in combination with pesticides. Thousands of veterans returned from the 1990-91 ground war in the Middle East complaining of chronic, unexplained health woes. The veterans said they are experiencing confusion, memory loss and balance problems. Others said they have pain in their neck, shoulders and hips, researchers said.
BCC News
The World Health Organization (WHO) says global warming could lead to a major increase in insect-borne diseases in Britain and Europe. It has called for urgent government action to prepare for the spread of diseases like malaria and encephalitis.
The average temperature in Europe has increased by 0.8C during the past century and the average global temperature could rise by another 3.5C by the year 2100, as heat is trapped in the atmosphere by a build-up of gases such as carbon dioxide. This would be accompanied by changes in rainfall patterns, greater precipitation and humidity in the atmosphere, and many new areas of floodwater. This in turn could lead to an increase in disease-carrying pests such as ticks, mosquitoes and rats, which live in warmer climates and whose breeding-grounds are often in damp areas.
Three countries in the European region covered by the WHO - Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Turkey - are already danger zones for mosquito-borne malaria. The WHO says the disease is likely to spread to further areas within eastern Europe, and from there, possibly, to western areas.
If northern Europe becomes warmer, ticks - which carry encephalitis and lyme disease - and sandflies - which carry visceral leishmaniasis - are likely to move in.
Call for urgent action
WHO researchers, who include experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Public Health Laboratory Service in London, say few countries in Europe have assessed the impact of climate change on human health. "There is an urgent need to consider how to improve research and monitoring and how to minimise adverse health impacts," they write in a report in the British Medical Journal. They also called for improved co-ordination between European countries, to share information and research and plan efforts to combat the problem.
The publication of the report coincides with the third European Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health in London, which is organised by the WHO. Ministers from 51 member countries are expected to sign a protocol on water and health during the three-day conference. They are also expected to consider a charter on transport, environment and health to reduce air pollution from cars.
KISII, Kenya (AP) - A malaria outbreak has spread in southwestern Kenya, killing at least 57 more people, a medical official said Monday. An estimated 200 people have already died in the outbreak, which was first reported in the district of Kisii two months ago. In the neighboring Transmara district, a remote area about 150 miles west of Nairobi, another 30,000 people have been affected by the virulent strain of highland malaria, said David ole Kisha, a clinical officer at the Kilkoris government hospital. "The situation here is very bad. Many people are dying in their villages as they could not access health facilities which are found only in Kilkoris town," Kisha said.
(CNN) Warming oceans are choking off marine life at an alarming pace and shrinking food supplies for people and other creatures dependent on the seas, according to a report released on Tuesday by two environmental groups. The report, released by the Washington-based World Wildlife Fund and the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Washington, said global warming has been starving several species.
LONDON (AP) - Environmental groups on Monday praised a British farmer's decision to destroy the country's first genetically modified test crop. Fred Barker, whose modified oilseed plants were sprayed last weekend with a powerful pesticide, insisted that he still backs modified foods. Barker, who planted the crop two months ago, said he destroyed the plants at his Wiltshire farm because his trustees both oppose such foods and were frightened by a threat from the Soil Association, an organic lobby group, to remove its endorsement from organic food produced elsewhere on the farm.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - Four New Mexicans have died this year of hantavirus and experts are worried this could be the beginning of an especially bad year for the mouse-borne disease. New Mexico has had five cases altogether this year: the four deaths, plus a 10-year-old who survived a hantavirus infection. In all of last year, the state had a total of six cases, compared with two cases in 1997 and one in 1996. There were four deaths in all of 1998 and none in the two previous years. All of this year's cases have been from the northwestern part of the state, where the strain of hantavirus labeled "Sin Nombre" or "No Name" was first recognized in 1993.
BANLUNG, Cambodia (AP) - A cholera outbreak in northeast Cambodia has killed at least 96 people and infected 1,538 since late April, aid agencies and hospital staff have reported. At least 89 people have died in the sparsely populated Ratanakiri province, and seven other deaths were reported in neighboring Stung Treng province. The remoteness of many of the affected areas and the poor state of health care in Ratanakiri have frustrated health workers battling the disease. A week ago they had hopes of controlling the outbreak, but an initial shortage of medicine and organizational tangles have kept patients pouring into the main hospital in the provincial capital of Banlung, about 200 miles northeast of Phnom Penh.
KISII, Kenya (AP) - At least 110 people have died in western Kenya in an outbreak of what is believed to be a strain of virulent highland malaria, a health officer said Thursday. Another 2,000 people are hospitalized. Kisii district health officer Dr. Thomas Ogaro said the local government hospital has treated more than 3,055 malaria cases, and some 1,386 people have been admitted for treatment since the beginning of the month. A reporter who visited the hospital Thursday found patients writhing on the floor because there were no free beds. Others were being treated in private clinics. Ogaro said the strain of malaria was resistant to treatment by chloroquine, and supplies of Atenum, Cotexin and Halifan, other drugs used to treat malaria, were insufficient.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Health officials say more pigs across Malaysia will be infected by the deadly Nipah virus that has already killed more than 100 people, news reports said Wednesday. Malaysia has been conducting random tests on pigs throughout the Southeast Asian nation, according to the Veterinary Services director general. Any hog farm found with just one infected pig must destroy its entire stock, a newspaper reported. The virus first surfaced in Negri Sembilan state in western Malaysia where 84 people died, including the outbreak's latest victim, pig farmer Gan Teng Hin, who died Monday. The virus has since swept into the states of Perak, Johor, Kelantan, Malacca and Selangor.
by Jon E. Dougherty (WorldNetDaily)
Military men and women are increasingly refusing to be vaccinated against Anthrax for fear the immunization is worse than the threat of disease. There is growing evidence they may be right. Researchers at Tulane University found that squalene, a naturally occurring substance in the human body, was found in higher than normal levels in the bodies of all service personnel who were vaccinated with a full compliment of vaccines by the U.S. government, whether they actually served in the Persian Gulf or not. Since that initial discovery, squalene has again surfaced as a possible causative agent in another military vaccine -- Anthrax -- that has sickened more military personnel who have begun taking the series as ordered by the Pentagon last year.
GENEVA (AP) - The U.S. refused Tuesday to commit to destroying its samples of the smallpox virus, even if the 191-nation World Health Organization upholds its decision that all stocks should be destroyed in six weeks. Smallpox was wiped out as a disease in 1980 following a worldwide immunization campaign, but known stocks of the virus are still kept in two laboratories - one in the U.S. and one in Russia. Terrorism experts in the U.S. maintain some of the Russian stocks may have been moved to other, undeclared sites that are possibly less secure than the declared laboratory, the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Siberia.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Malaysia has ordered the immediate closure of 79 pig farms in the southern state of Malacca because tests showed that pigs on four of the farms were infected with the deadly Nipah virus, news reports said Monday. Malacca Chief Minister Abu Zahar Isnin was quoted by the national news agency Bernama as saying that health officials would slaughter 27,700 pigs on the four farms. Malacca is the latest Malaysian state affected by the eight-month outbreak of two viruses that have killed more than 100 people this year. Health officials initially believed the disease was Japanese encephalitis, which is transmitted from pigs to humans by the Culex mosquito. Later, scientists identified a new virus, named Nipah after the Malaysian village where it claimed its first victim.
Baltimore (CNN) -- In the unlikely event that the deadly and invisible anthrax organism is ever released in the air of a populated area, U.S. doctors and public health directors now have guidelines for how to respond. The recommendations appear in the May 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues in the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense wrote that anthrax, one of numerous biological agents that could be used as weapons, could cripple a city or region. They cite a 1993 report that estimated the aerosolized release of 100 kilograms of anthrax spore upwind of Washington, D.C., could kill 130,000 to 3 million people -- matching or exceeding the lethal effects of a hydrogen bomb.
According to the report, anthrax is odorless, invisible and could travel miles through the air. They say the first evidence of an anthrax attack could be "the sudden appearance of a large number of patients in a city or region with an acute-onset, flu-like illness and case fatality rates of 80 percent or more, with nearly half of all deaths occurring within 24 to 48 hours."
Naturally occurring anthrax is a bacteria that infects animals. Livestock are usually vaccinated against the disease. The more usual ways humans become infected include handling material from infected animals and inhaling anthrax spores from infected animal materials. Human cases of anthrax are extremely rare in the United States.
If recognized in the initial stages of infection, anthrax is easily controlled with antibiotics. However, the initial symptoms, which include fever, difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, coughing, headache, vomiting, chills, weakness, abdominal pain and chest pain, are difficult to distinguish from a number of illnesses.
In the event of a bioterrorist attack with anthrax, the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense recommended:
1) The first suspicion of anthrax infection must lead to immediate notification of the local or state health department, local hospital epidemiologist and local or state health laboratory.
2) Vaccination of some essential service personnel should be considered if vaccine becomes available. If vaccines were readily available, post-exposure vaccination after an attack in combination with antibiotics would be recommended for those exposed.
3) Early antibiotic therapy is essential after exposure to anthrax. A delay even by hours could substantially lessen chances for survival. Given the difficulty in achieving rapid diagnosis, all persons with fever or evidence of systemic disease in an area where anthrax cases are occurring should be treated for anthrax.
4) Standard barrier isolation precautions are recommended for hospitalized patients with anthrax infection. Proper burial or cremation of humans and animals who have died because of anthrax infection is important. Serious consideration should be given to cremation.
5) Anyone who comes into direct contact with any substance that could be anthrax should thoroughly wash any exposed skin or clothing with soap and water and should receive antibiotics until the substance is proved not to be anthrax.
"Most experts concur that the manufacture of a lethal anthrax aerosol is beyond the capacity of individuals or groups without access to advanced biotechnology," the authors wrote. "However, autonomous groups with substantial funding and contacts may be able to acquire the required materials for a successful attack," the report concluded.
(MSNBC) — In a discovery that could lead to powerful new vaccines and antibiotics, researchers have isolated a key gene that bacteria use to launch killer infections. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have demonstrated in laboratory studies that removing or inactivating a gene called DAM can disarm a strain of salmonella, bacteria that cause food poisoning in humans.
ATLANTA (AP) - In a quarantined laboratory, U.S. scientists outfitted in plastic biohazard spacesuits and breathing through air tubes are probing a killer that has struck on the other side of the world. The mysterious microscopic enemy has killed more than 100 people in Malaysia in seven months, and scientists are baffled about its origin and mode of transmission. "Every couple of years something like this comes along," says Dr. C.J. Peters, head of the special pathogens branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We don't know how this stuff spreads, how far it's going to go. We really don't know what's at the end of the tunnel."
A fish species that had not been seen for 85 years has been caught by chance in the Great Australian Bight. Marine scientists with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization identified the "lost" species as a giant roughy, or giant sawbelly, first recorded in 1914 in the Bight by fisheries scientist Harald Dannevig. "This is good news about a species that hasn't been seen in a long time," said Peter Last, a taxonomist with the research organization who is co-authoring an identification guide for edible Australian fish species Last had been in Port Adelaide photographing and recording commercial species coming off Great Australian Bight trawlers and had been speaking with fishermen, industry managers and processors about species on the handbook 'wanted' list. At the same time, Port Adelaide trawlerman Tim Parsons and skipper of the Noble Pearl had been sorting his catch and had put aside a selection of fish including the giant roughy and the similar Darwins roughy, distinct because of their pink bodies.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Officials from 12 African countries gathered in Nairobi Tuesday as part of the World Health Organization's campaign to control malaria. The WHO initiative aims to coordinate efforts to fight the disease throughout Africa. The continent accounts for 90 percent of the world's malaria cases, the organization said. "Malaria is not only a health problem in Africa. It has everything to do with our development," said Edwin Afari, a WHO official at the meeting. The direct and indirect costs of malaria rose to an estimated $2 billion in 1997 from $800 million in 1987, said Dr. Rufaro Chatora, the WHO's representative to Kenya. Malaria kills an estimated 1.5 to 2.7 million people annually, according to the WHO.
"Technology Protection System" (TPS), otherwise known as Terminator Technology.
My name is Bob Mueller. I'm not a paid activist, nor am I really an activist at all, aside from the fact that I've been jostled out of complacency enough to write this alert. I am, however, an ordinary citizen who is quite unsettled by one specific issue: U.S. Patent 5,723,765, entitled "Control of Plant Gene Expression". The patent covers technology referred to as a plant "Technology Protection System" (TPS), otherwise known as Terminator Technology.
My goal is simple: to share my concern with you, in the hope that you will be alarmed enough to more completely educate yourself regarding this matter. For if I can accomplish this, I am convinced, you will surely ACT.
The USDA, spending public money, has developed a technology whereby seeds can be stripped of their ability to propagate. They are in the process of patenting the process worldwide on behalf of Monsanto, through a subsidiary (Delta and Pine Land Company).
The driving force behind the Terminator technology is the ability for Monsanto, and Delta and Pine Land Co., to protect their "inventions" from being "duplicated" unlawfully, which, granted, sounds appropriate and fair.
The result, however, will be to replace natural crops worldwide, with genetically enhanced, superior, high yield crops. Superior, that is, except for the fact that they can no longer reproduce themselves, effectively forcing farmers worldwide to buy their seeds annually from Monsanto...the world's only supplier.
The patent applies to ALL PLANTS.
This is the ultimate in Capitalism. We're going to remove nature's ability to propagate herself, so we can charge money for that privilege.
However, I only wish this were the full extent of the issue.
The part that pushes my button; the part that really unnerves me, is the probability that, for all their careful planning, this genetically altered organism will share its suicidal genes with OTHER plant species.
Most children know about the "birds and the bees" ... Indeed, Martha L. Crouch, Associate Professor of Biology at Indiana University, has published a series of papers specifying how the resulting castrated plants WILL be able to sterilise nearby normal species, via the spread of Terminator pollen. Not only that, but how these plants will be able to actually *pass* the toxin gene to other plant species through cross-pollination:
When farmers plant the Terminator seeds, the seeds already will have been treated with tetracycline, and thus the recombinase will have acted, and the toxin coding sequence will be next to the seed-specific promoter, and will be ready to act when the end of seed development comes around. The seeds will grow into plants, and make pollen. Every pollen grain will carry a ready-to-act toxin gene. If the Terminator crop is next to a field planted in a normal variety, and pollen is taken by insects or the wind to that field, any eggs fertilised by the Terminator pollen will now have one toxin gene. It will be activated late in that seed's development, and the seed will die. However, it is unlikely that the person growing the normal variety will be able to tell, because the seed will probably look normal. Only when that seed is planted, and doesn't germinate, will the change become apparent. In most cases, the toxin gene will not be passed on any further, because dead plants don't reproduce. However, under certain conditions I will discuss later, it is possible for the toxin gene to be inherited.
http://www.bio.indiana.edu/people/terminator.html
Yet this "product" has been virtually assured of being passed as safe, in the USDA's own words: "These approvals are expected because there appear to be no crop or food safety risks to the new technology. There also appear to be no environmental risks."
http://www.rafi.org/translator/termtrans.html
Now why would the USDA come to this conclusion on a technology that has only been tested by those having a vested interest in its commercial success?
Could it be because it's worth an estimated 1.5 billion dollars a year in licensing fees alone, and the USDA is LICENSING the technology to Monsanto?
Awesome economics on a global scale! Patent has been applied for in 87 countries.
Please, please, go to the following web page, and read the data... both sides of the story. There are many more potential problems with this technology than I have outlined here. Follow the links. Assure yourself that you are, indeed, awake, for you may be tempted to think this is merely a bad dream -- or a science-fiction story.
If you are as affected by the nature of this venture as I was, at the very least, please use the RAFI site to model a letter of protest that will be sent simultaneously to the Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, the Administrator of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, the Chair of the US House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, and the Chair of the US Senate Agriculture Committee.
This technology has NOT yet been commercialised. We are, in fact, in the uncommon position of being able to say "NO" before it becomes widespread -- pun intended.
I hope I have convinced you to examine this issue. As a concerned individual, I thank you for your time.
Bob Mueller. E-mail: bobm@lightspeed.wa.com
(I am in no way affiliated with the above web sites or any organised "campaign" against this technology. I write to inform. Please feel free to forward this notice to your family and friends. Post where appropriate. However, I ask that this message be posted or forwarded in its entirety, without editing.)
Testing for the newest strains of influenza keeps USAF members healthy. Project Gargle is an integral part of the World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating centers for influenza, via the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in the United States. In the WHO program, the Armstrong Laboratory Epidemiology Services Branch provides the CDC with a weekly summary of upper respiratory infection/influenza morbidity rates and the number of viral isolates. Data are provided by 14 sentinel USAF bases (six in the continental US and eight overseas) and are unique within DOD. Depending on the time of year and base location, the "target number" of weekly specimens submitted ranges from four to eight. Specimens are screened for seven types of respiratory viruses: influenza A and B, Respiratory Syncytial (RSV), adenoviruses, and parainfluenza ( 1, 2, and 3).
In every war, respiratory illness has denigrated readiness to a greater extent than combat related injury and death. The annual results of Project Gargle are used by the National Civilian Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in reaching decisions concerning influenza vaccine formulation. The USAF's influenza immunization program serves as the key preventive medicine program for reducing the impact of influenza in the active duty population. The success of the USAF Project Gargle program requires close cooperation between the medical staff, laboratory technicians, and military public health team to ensure that appropriate and adequate specimens are submitted. This is a very successful preventive medicine program with worldwide impact.
OPR: AL/AOES, (210) 536-3471 [DSN 240]
By Fred Pearce and Debora Mackenzie
RAIN IS NOT what it used to be. A new study reveals that much of the precipitation in Europe contains such high levels of dissolved pesticides that it would be illegal to supply it as drinking water.
Studies in Switzerland have found that rain is laced with toxic levels of atrazine, alachlor and other commonly used crop sprays. "Drinking water standards are regularly exceeded in rain," says Stephan Müller, a chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology in Dübendorf. The chemicals appear to have evaporated from fields and become part of the clouds.
Both the European Union and Switzerland have set a limit of 100 nanograms for any particular pesticide in a litre of drinking water. But, especially in the first minutes of a heavy storm, rain can contain much more than that.
In a study to be published by Müller and his colleague Thomas Bucheli in Analytical Chemistry this summer, one sample of rainwater contained almost 4000 nanograms per litre of 2,4-dinitrophenol, a widely used pesticide. Previously, the authors had shown that in rain samples taken from 41 storms, nine contained more than 100 nanograms of atrazine per litre, one of them around 900 nanograms.
In the latest study, the highest concentrations of pesticides turned up in the first rain after a long dry spell, particularly when local fields had recently been sprayed. Until now, scientists had assumed that the pesticides only infiltrated groundwater directly from fields.
Müller warns that the growing practice of using rainwater that falls onto roofs to recharge underground water may be adding to the danger. This water often contains dissolved herbicides that had been added to roofing materials, such as bitumen sheets, to prevent vegetation growing. He suggests that the first flush of rains should be diverted into sewers to minimise the pollution of drinking water, which is not usually treated to remove these herbicides and pesticides.
Meanwhile, Swedish researchers have linked pesticides to one of the most rapidly increasing cancers in the Western world. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has risen by 73 per cent in the US since 1973, is probably caused by several commonly used crop sprays, say the scientists.
Lennart Hardell of Orebro Medical Centre and Mikael Eriksson of Lund University Hospital found Swedish sufferers of the disease were 2.7 times more likely to have been exposed to MCPA, a widely used weedkiller, than healthy people (Cancer, vol 85 p 1353).
MCPA, which is used on grain crops, is sold as Target by the Swiss firm Novartis. In addition, patients were 3.7 times more likely to have been exposed to a range of fungicides, an association not previously reported.
The patients were also 2.3 times more likely to have had contact with glyphosate, the most commonly used herbicide in Sweden. Use of this chemical, sold as Round-Up by the US firm Monsanto, is expected to rocket with the introduction of crops, such as Roundup-Ready soya beans, that are genetically modified to resist glyphosate. The researchers suggest that the chemicals have suppressed the patients' immunity, allowing viruses such as Epstein-Barr to trigger cancer.
(CNN) Imagine a cotton T-shirt that breaks down pesticides into harmless particles immediately on contact or a pair of denim jeans that disinfects itself when it touches germs or viruses. It is not far off, says a University of California, Davis researcher. In what could be a breakthrough for people working everywhere from farms to hospitals, UC Davis scientist Gang Sun thinks his chemically treated fabrics could change the way people wear their work clothes.
As soldiers continued to shoot thousands of pigs suspected of carrying a deadly virus, American health experts arrived in Malaysia on Monday to help combat the virus outbreak, which has killed more than 50 people. Researchers from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, invited by the Malaysian Health Ministry, will set up an office and laboratory at the Ministry to monitor cases of Japanese encephalitis and related causes of illness, a U.S. embassy official said.
A joint NASA-industry team has developed a new drug that may decrease the length and severity of the flu and prevent the development of symptoms in those exposed to the virus, NASA said in a statement. The drug is from a new class of medicines called neuraminidase inhibitors. They are designed to block an active site of an enzyme associated with the flu.
ATLANTA (AP) - Eight years after the Gulf War, researchers are still struggling to understand the mysterious maladies suffered by thousands of veterans. And after a three-day conference of researchers, doctors and veterans, the situation seems no clearer. Conference participants issued several recommendations Tuesday, from establishing yet another committee to investigate veterans' complaints to taking a closer look into the effects of exposure to depleted uranium - spread into the air when armor-piercing shells and bombs explode. Although thousands of Gulf War veterans have complained of chronic illnesses such as fatigue, joint pain and memory loss, researchers have not been able to link the symptoms to any particular disease or biological agent.
by: Bob Mueller
bobm@lightspeed.wa.com
The USDA, spending public money, has developed a technology whereby seeds can be stripped of their ability to propagate. They are in the process of patenting the process worldwide on behalf of Monsanto, through a subsidiary (Delta and Pine Land Company).
The driving force behind the Terminator technology is the ability for Monsanto, and Delta and Pine Land Co., to protect their "inventions" from being "duplicated" unlawfully, which, granted, sounds appropriate and fair.
The result, however, will be to replace natural crops worldwide, with genetically enhanced, superior, high yield crops. Superior, that is, except for the fact that they can no longer reproduce themselves, effectively forcing farmers worldwide to buy their seeds annually from Monsanto...the world's only supplier.
The patent applies to ALL PLANTS.
This is the ultimate in Capitalism. We're going to remove nature's ability to propagate herself, so we can charge money for that privilege. However, I only wish this were the full extent of the issue.
The part that pushes my button; the part that really unnerves me, is the probability that, for all their careful planning, this genetically altered organism will share its suicidal genes with OTHER plant species.
Most children know about the "birds and the bees" ... Indeed, Martha L. Crouch, Associate Professor of Biology at Indiana University, has published a series of papers specifying how the resulting castrated plants WILL be able to sterilize nearby normal species, via the spread of Terminator pollen. Not only that, but how these plants will be able to actually *pass* the toxin gene to other plant species through cross-pollination: when farmers plant the Terminator seeds, the seeds already will have been treated with tetracycline, and thus the recombinase will have acted, and the toxin coding sequence will be next to the seed-specific promoter, and will be ready to act when the end of seed development comes around. The seeds will grow into plants, and make pollen. Every pollen grain will carry a ready-to-act toxin gene. If the Terminator crop is next to a field planted in a normal variety, and pollen is taken by insects or the wind to that field, any eggs fertilized by the Terminator pollen will now have one toxin gene. It will be activated late in that seed's development, and the seed will die. However, it is unlikely that the person growing the normal variety will be able to tell, because the seed will probably look normal. Only when that seed is planted, and doesn't germinate, will the change become apparent. In most cases, the toxin gene will not be passed on any further, because dead plants don't reproduce. However, under certain conditions I will discuss later, it is possible for the toxin gene to be inherited.
(Reuters) American researchers have found bacteria in chicken feed that are resistant to the most powerful antibiotics and could pose a health threat to humans.
In a letter to The Lancet medical journal on Friday, Dr Glen Morris of the University of Maryland in Baltimore said the discovery of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) in animal feed raised fears that it could be passed on to humans.
“THE IDENTIFICATION of a highly resistant enterococal strain in feed raises disturbing questions about the potential for penetration of VRE strains into farms and food animal populations in the USA and subsequent risk of transfer into human populations,” he said in the letter. Animal feed is not expected to be sterile but researchers believe it is the first report of VRE from commercially prepared chicken feed in the United States. Vancomycin is the last line of resistance to so-called superbugs that have built up a resistance to most conventional drugs. Enterococci, which causes intestinal problems, is a common source of infection in hospitals and usually treated with antibiotics. Scientists blame the increase in superbugs on the overuse of antibiotics in people and animals. Medical experts think animals are the source of superbugs that are passed on to humans. The discovery of the drug-resistant enterococci in animal feed means it could be transferred to animals and to humans. The researchers did not say which company made the chicken feed or how it become contaminated, but they said drug resistant enterococci was widespread in at least one lot of feed.
HONG KONG (AP) _ A supergerm that has proven resistant to one of the most potent antibiotics available has killed a Hong Kong woman, officials said today, raising fears that more such germs could develop as doctors continue to misuse or overuse antibiotics. The middle-aged woman died last year at Queen Mary Hospital after becoming infected with a strain of staphylococcus aureus bacteria, or staph, despite two weeks of intensive antibiotics treatment, a spokeswoman from the official Hospital Authority said. Speaking on customary condition of anonymity, the spokeswoman confirmed a report published today in the South China Morning Post. The hospital declined to reveal the patient's identity. The woman, who also suffered from cancer, was one of a few known cases in the world in which staph proved resistant to vancomycin, an antibiotic known as ``the silver bullet,'' which doctors use as the last resort to treat infections when all other antibiotics fail. ``We are getting into the terminal stage. It is very dangerous; the bacteria have broken the last defense,'' Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiologist at the hospital and the University of Hong Kong, was quoted as telling the newspaper. For several years, doctors have been warning of the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria. Bacteria become more deadly as they mutate to survive increasing potent drugs. Yuen told the Post that a decade earlier, Hong Kong doctors discovered a case of streptococcus pneumonia that was resistant to penicillin, but now 70 percent of the cases here are resistant. Many doctors fear the time is coming when some patients will have no alternative antibiotics to turn to _ for the first time since antibiotics hit the market in the 1950s. Part of the problem is an overwillingness on the part of doctors and patients to use antibiotics for routine illnesses that could be cured by people's natural immune systems, which makes the medicines less effective. Patients ``should not seek antibiotics for a quick cure,'' Yuen said. Staph, a virulent bacterium that lives on human skin, is a common cause of infections. Many people have the germ, and it's usually harmless. But the germ can occasionally enter the body through wounds and cause serious infections of the skin, soft tissues, bones and joints. It spreads through direct contact and can cause pneumonia and fatal bacteremia, or bacterial infection of the blood, which reportedly killed the woman in Hong Kong.
STANFORD - Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Davis, have received funds to study whirling disease, a parasite-borne disease that is devastating native trout populations in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. Young rainbow trout are particularly susceptible to the disease that causes them to swim in erratic circles, known as tail-chasing behavior. Debilitated fish have difficulty feeding and eventually starve or succumb to predators before they are old enough to reproduce.
``The problem is extensive and it`s getting worse,`` said Irving Weissman, MD, Stanford professor of cancer biology, pathology and developmental biology and a member of the Whirling Disease Foundation`s scientific advisory board. Weissman is also an avid fly-fisherman. ``It has utterly devastated the fishing in the Madison River,`` he said, referring to a river in Montana. ``The rainbow trout used to be several thousand per mile, and they are now down to less than fifty per mile.``
The depletion of native trout populations is raising alarm among environmentalists and fly-fishing enthusiasts alike. According to the Whirling Disease Foundation, the parasite is not transmissible to humans, but researchers hope to figure out why rainbow trout, cutthroat trout and chinook salmon fall victim to the disease while close relatives such as coho salmon and brown trout become infected with the parasite but rarely show any signs of clinical disease.
Peter Parham, PhD, Stanford professor of structural biology and microbiology and immunology, and his collaborator, Ronald Hedrick, professor of veterinary medicine and epidemiology at UC Davis, have been awarded $75,000 each from the Whirling Disease Foundation for their collaborative studies.
``What we can do at Stanford is look at the genetics to see if there`s a resistant allele,`` said Benny Shum, research assistant in Parham`s lab and lead investigator of the whirling disease project. ``We want to understand the diversity of these fish and see if some of them have genetic resistance to the disease.``
Whirling disease is caused by a parasite (Myxobolus cerebralis) that invades young fish through the skin and then rapidly multiplies within the head and spinal cartilage. The ensuing pressure on nerves in the brainstem and spinal cord causes the fish to adopt the characteristic whirling that lends the disease its name. The parasite, a European native, was introduced into North American waters in the late 1950s and has since spread to 22 states.
When a diseased fish dies, thousands of parasite spores are released into the water. The spores are highly resilient and can survive for up to 30 years in an aquatic environment. In the water, the spores are ingested by the tubifex worm, the alternate host of the parasite. Inside the worm, the spores hatch into the parasitic form that can once again infect young trout. Fish can also become infected by eating other diseased fish.
Parham and Shum believe that genes in the fishes` immune system may be the key to why some fish are susceptible to the disease while others remain resistant. They are focusing on cell surface molecules encoded by a family of genes belonging to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). These molecules bind foreign antigens such as small fragments of viruses, parasites or bacteria, and display them on the outside of the cell - alerting other immune system cells that the host cell has been invaded by a foreign entity. The MHC molecules are highly variable so that they can bind a plethora of unwelcome cellular guests.
In humans, different varieties of these MHC molecules are associated with resistance to certain infectious diseases and Parham and Shum suspect that the same may be true in fish. They plan to study the MHC genes of a range of fish in an effort to correlate immune system genes with symptoms of whirling disease. Fish to be investigated will include those that have been experimentally infected with known doses of the whirling disease parasite, natural populations of disease-resistant fish from different rivers and a random sample of fish from hatcheries.
The Whirling Disease Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Bozeman, Mont. The Foundation`s fifth annual symposium on the disease will be held in Missoula, Mont., February 18-20, 1999.
CRYSTAL CITY, Va.
A lone terrorist creates a designer microbe deadly enough to annihilate most of Manhattan. After it’s unleashed into the air, the virus will jump, silently, from person to person, infecting millions of unknowing victims. Air travelers will spread the microbe across the nation — and thousands will die within weeks. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could, public-health experts said here Tuesday — and more importantly, America is woefully unprepared for such an attack.
THE COMPELLING tale is indeed fiction, but presents a potentially very real scenario, said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who gave the keynote address here Monday at the start of a groundbreaking meeting on bioterrorism. More importantly, novels such as Richard Preston’s “The Cobra Event” raise a logical question that has not been adequately answered: “How do we successfully contain and combat the emerging threat [of bioterrorism]?” Shalala asked the audience of political leaders, physicians, scientists and intelligence experts gathered to talk about what to do should an assault be launched on civilians in the United States. While experts here stressed that the risk of a biological attack is extremely small — you’re much more likely to be hit by a car, for example — they said the United States is woefully unprepared should an attack occur. Bioterrorism presents unique challenges, they added. The effects of chemical warfare are often obvious immediately after an attack, allowing public-health officials time to mobilize and clean up the area within hours or days. But a biological attack might not be evident until weeks after the initial infection. And by then, the silent microbes could have spread to thousands, killing most in their wake. “Release of smallpox into the general population would be one of the most serious threats to mankind,” said Dr. D.A. Henderson, director of the new Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, which sponsored the meeting. “Unfortunately today, that is a very real scenario.”
By Robert Bazell
NBC NEWS
It is a terrifying scenario — a world where antibiotics no longer protect us from common life-threatening infections. But it is a prospect growing ever closer. “We think it is a very important public-health problem both in the United States and throughout the world,” says Dr. William Jarvis.
IN THIS WEEK’S issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Jarvis and other scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta published extensive details of the first cases of Staphylococcus (or “Staph”) bacteria, the most common source of human infection, that are resistant to all antibiotics — even vancomycin, the one powerful drug that always worked when all else failed. “With the emergence of these strains we now have a crack in that wall,” Jarvis says. So far, there are four known cases worldwide of Staph partially resistant to vancomycin — but no one thinks that is the end of it. “We feel that may be only the tip of the iceberg,” Jarvis says. Why do bacteria become resistant? The answer is natural selection — survival of the fittest. In the presence of drugs that should kill them, the bacteria mutate until a few survive that can withstand the attack of the antibiotic.
What can be done? At St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, Anne Marie O’Brien, a nurse, heads infection control. Her greatest fear: resistant germs. “It adds a heightened consciousness and more vigilance on our part,” O’Brien says. O’Brien and her staff meticulously follow infection-control procedures. If the hospital’s lab detects antibiotic resistance, isolation rooms stand ready to make sure the infection does not spread. And most important, the medical staff follows CDC guidelines to try to keep antibiotic use to a minimum — to give the germs less of a chance to grow resistant. So far such measures are paying off — the CDC found no evidence that the first resistant strains spread. But even with continued vigilance, we face the peril of infections we cannot treat.
A fictional account that could become reality
By Charlene Laino
MSNBC CRYSTAL CITY, Va.
Working out of a truck, a terrorist group unleashes a cloud of anthrax over a football stadium in the town of Northeast. It will be days, and they will be miles away, before public-health officials know what happened.
WHILE A fictional scenario, the tale of Northeast illustrates just how real the threat of bioterrorism is, said Dr. Thomas Ingelsby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies in Baltimore. At a meeting here Tuesday, he presented “Anthrax: a possible case history” to the audience:
Nov. 1: Bioterrorists release anthrax over the stadium.
Nov. 3: Northeast experiences a city-wide surge in what appear to be flu-like symptoms, with about 400 residents seeking out medical care. Because influenza has been on the rise over the past two weeks, doctors do not suspect anything out of the ordinary. Patients are sent home with a prescription to get plenty of bed rest and drink plenty of fluids.
Nov. 4: Some young, otherwise healthy patients are sicker than one would expect from a flu, leading physicians to contact local health officials. Laboratory tests prove the patients have been infected with the class of bacteria known as Bacillus, but no one does further testing to determine what type of Bacillus. (Note: Some Bacilli are relatively harmless.) The first deaths are reported, prompting urgent calls to the state and local health officials. They, in turn, contact the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. By the end of day, 1,200 are ill, 80 of whom have died.
Nov. 5: Health officials begin considering the possibility of a highly virulent microbe, such as the deadly Hong Kong flu. As the number of cases double, isolation of patients is recommended to prevent further spread. During a press conference, the mayor appeals for calm, but looks visibly surprised when asked about the possibility of a bioterrorist attack. Patients begin experiencing even more severe symptoms, including high fever, low blood pressure and septic shock. There is still no diagnosis. Physicians are told to wear protective gear, but it turns out there are only 24 hoods in the entire town of Northeast. The football stadium has now been identified as the center of epidemic, with many of the ill reporting they had attended a game there on Nov. 1. By the end of the day, the CDC has hit upon the diagnosis: anthrax, one of the deadliest microbes known to man. The mayor is outraged when she finds out there had been an anthrax threat on her town the week before, but that the FBI had failed to inform her. She is also told that a limited amount of vaccine exists, but no one knows if any will be made available to her town. As for treatment, antibiotics are recommended, but they need to be given early in the course of infection. Everyone who attended the Nov. 1 football game is urged to take prophylactic antibiotics. However, there are not enough drugs to go around, so several police stations are set up as distribution centers. By the end of day, 2,700 are ill, 300 of whom have died.
Nov. 6: By early morning, no antibiotics are left. Fifty thousand people have reportedly received doses, but no one knows whom. Gyms and shelters are opened for the ill. The media reports that the antibiotics were distributed unfairly, prompting violence. Also, doctors realize that not everyone who has been stricken was at the football game; the weather condition are now judged to have been such that the anthrax spores may have infected everyone within eight miles to the east. More panic. Despite an assurance that anthrax is not contagious, traffic is disrupted as bus drivers from other towns refuse to cross Northeast’s lines. By the end of day, 3,200 are ill, 900 of whom have died.
Nov. 7: A federal shipment of antibiotics arrives. The FBI reports that a truck was the source of the attack, but has no further details. The CDC announces that all bodies must be cremated, promoting outrage by some religious groups. More panic. By the end of day, 4,000 are ill, 1,600 of whom have died.
Nov. 8: Most health-care workers are calling in ill, and public transport is barely operational. Schools are closed. By the end of day, 4,800 are ill, 2,400 of whom have died.
In all, 20,000 people were infected in this scenario, Ingelsby said, with 4,800 becoming ill and 4,000 dying. Some were in other cities and states. The FBI never did find the culprits, but are still looking. The area downwind of the stadium became known as The Dead Zone, abandoned by homeowners and businesses alike.
Although 250,000 people received antibiotics, no one know who or how much, he said. The cost of treating everyone with a course of antibiotics would have been less than $100 per victim; the cost of having enough vaccine, less than $1 per person.
“While this is a truly horribly scenario, it could be real,” Ingelsby said, “and thus presents an enormous challenge.” Relatively modest preparation efforts could have made a difference, he said.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - A rare fish species may be extinct following the death of huge numbers of fish in a lake on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, an expert said Monday. Hundreds of tons of decaying fish are drifting in Singkarak Lake, 60 miles north of Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province. Hefrizal Sandri, a fish expert at Padang's Bung Hata University, said the disaster last week might have wiped out the Bilih fish, which exists only in Singkarak Lake. Its scientific name is Mystacoleneus padangensis. The government and researchers are still trying to figure out the cause of the disaster, Hefrizal said.
(ENN) The spread of oyster disease in Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and northward along the Atlantic Coast can be linked directly to changes in winter water temperature which reflect climate warming, according to shellfish researchers.
The parasitic oyster diseases MSX and Dermo are caused by warm-water parasites that infect a variety of oysters around the world. There is no known remedy for the diseases and for more than two decades, oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay and mid-Atlantic waters have been increasingly battered by Dermo and MSX. In the Northeast, a new and as yet unidentified pathogen, called juvenile oyster disease, has been taking a toll in hatcheries. On the West Coast, the Pacific oyster has been subjected to puzzling summer mortalities.
Old Dominion University researcher Eileen E. Hofmann and her colleagues presented their findings Jan. 22 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Other researchers included John M. Klinck, Old Dominion University; Susan E. Ford and Eric N. Powell, Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, Rutgers University. There work is funded under the National Sea Grant College Oyster Disease Research Program.
Ford's research team looked at the historical record of monitoring for oyster diseases and found direct evidence that increased winter water temperatures have been important in the recent outbreak of MSX along the mid-Atlantic and northeastern Atlantic coastline.
Hofmann and her colleagues developed two models that simulate the host-parasite-environmental interactions of eastern oysters and the different pathogens that cause the two diseases. The models were structured around the proliferation and death rates of both parasites under different environmental conditions. Simulations were developed that use environmental conditions characteristic of Delaware and Chesapeake bays to reproduce the seasonal disease cycles and consequent oyster mortality.
These simulations showed the effect of environmental factors, such as salinity and cold temperatures on controlling the intensity and prevalence of infections. "Results of these simulations can be used to understand the causes underlying the northward spread of these two oyster diseases along the East Coast of the United States, from Chesapeake Bay to Maine, in the decade of the 1990s," Hofmann says.
Informed resource management of shellfish populations is imperative for two reasons. It's a valuable commercial industry and shellfish populations provide a tremendous filtering ability that can help stabilize coastal estuaries' environmental systems.
"Our findings," says Hofmann, "demonstrate how important climate is in regulating diseases such as Dermo and MSX. We have to manage the disease populations with a long-term climate perspective which means that you have to be aware of such occurrences as an El Niño or other climatic effects. You cannot set management strategies based simply on what you see this week or what you've done in the past."
(ENN) Biotechnology, which includes the application of tissue culture, immunological techniques, molecular genetics and recombinant DNA techniques in all facets of agricultural production and agro-industry, together with other technologies, could provide solutions for some of the old problems hindering sustainable rural development and achievement of food security, the Food and Agriculture Organization said.
According to the organization, biotechnology-derived solutions built into the genotype of plants could reduce the use of agrochemicals and promote sustainable yields. The application of pesticides and fungicides could be reduced through plants with genetic pest resistance. Plants with a high tolerance for conditions of salinity or high iron toxicity could help to improve agricultural production in marginal areas.
Some biotechnological techniques, like in-vitro culture, are very helpful for maintenance of germplasm collections of species with low fertility and of species that are hard to keep as seeds or in field gene banks, according to the report.
"Biotechnology may reduce genetic diversity indirectly by displacing landraces and their inherent diversity as farmers adopt genetically uniform varieties of plants and other organisms. At the same time, it increases the potential to preserve and sustainably use diversity. In the case of endangered animal breeds, cryopreservation and somatic cloning can strengthen traditional conservation strategies," the report said.
The report calls for biotechnology research and policy efforts focused on the needs of the poor who depend on agriculture, especially in marginal areas where it will be difficult to achieve productivity increases.
"Adequate biosafety regulations, risk assessment of biotechnology products, mechanisms and instruments for monitoring use and compliance to ensure that there will be no harmful effects on the environment or for people" are also required, according to the report.
Some of the potential environmental risks concern plant pests. Gene escape from genetically modified organisms may result in increased weediness in wild species, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
The inclusion of novel genes for herbicide resistance in plants may increase the occurrence of weeds with resistance to certain agrochemicals, the report warned. "The inclusion of pest resistance in plants should be carefully evaluated for potential development of resistance in pests and possible side-effects on beneficial organisms."
The report encourages the Food and Agriculture Organization help members to optimize their capacity to develop, adapt and utilize biotechnology and its products to suit their needs and environment, and thus enhance global food security and improve living standards for all.
ILION, N.Y. (AP)
The families of two Marines are protesting the government's plans to vaccinate 2.4 million military personnel against anthrax, saying it could lead to long-term health problems for their sons. The parents of Adam Cooper and Bradley Watson, friends who grew up together in this town east of Utica, say the military does not know enough about the vaccination and its side effects to require shots for all its personnel. So far, about 166,000 people have received at least the first in a series of six vaccinations against the potentially fatal disease, according to Jim Turner, a spokesman for the Department of Defense. Turner says the vaccine has been around for the last 25 to 30 years and is safe.
By Charlene Laino MSNBC
ANAHEIM, Calif., Jan. 23
Blurring the line between science and science fiction further than ever before, a prominent genetics researcher predicted Saturday that he will create a new form of life within a decade. The man-made life form — artificial bacteria — could be used to clean up environmental spills or to create new drug delivery systems, said J. Craig Venter, director of The Institute of Genetics Research in Rockville, Md. But Before... scientists introduce a new form of life, a community-wide debate on the ethics of such research must take place, said Venter, a pioneer in the rapidly growing field of genomics. If, through genomics, “we can get down to the building blocks of life, can we rebuild them into a new organism?” he asked. “No doubt, we can. “But is that ethical? And what are the implications in terms of biowarfare?” Venter has been mired in controversy for years, in 1998 announcing that he would take his genetic sequencing knowledge and join forces with a private company. Their goal: to unravel the genome, or DNA sequence, of humans by the year 2001 - faster and less expensively than the government. What made it possible, Venter said, are highly automated sequencing machines that have greater computational power, allowing researchers to blast 10 genomes into billions of base pairs and then reassemble them, in order. To power the research, TIGR built one of the biggest computers in the world, which occupies most of a 26,000 square-foot floor of its building. The federally sponsored Human Genome Project, one the other hand, utilizes a clone-by-clone approach that more slowly - though critics say more accurately — build billions of DNA pieces into the approximately 60,000 genes that make up the human genome. But even as they chip away at unraveling the human genome, TIGR has already published the complete genetic sequence of several other organisms.
CREATING A NEW LIFE FORM To build a new organism from scratch, Venter said, scientists first needed to arrive at a molecular definition of life - the minimum set of genes that contains the complete instructions to build and operate a living organism. The smallest known genome turned out to be Mycoplasma genitalium, which sports just 470 genes compared to the 60,000 to 80,000 genes that comprise man. A ubiquitous and relatively harmless bacterium, almost everyone has been infected with Mycoplasma genitalium at some point. Once his team had its entire genome sequence, they started knocking out different genes to see if it would still code for the entire organism. “What we were surprised at is the number of the 470 genes in Mycoplasma genitalium that we could knock out and still have a complete organism,” Venter said. “Our best estimate at this point is that we can knock out some 200 genes, meaning that only 300 or so are needed.” Once they know exactly which 300 are needed, he said, they can splice them together and create a new creature. The new life form could then be tailored with other genes so that it absorbs toxins, for example, or can deliver drugs, Venter said.
THE ETHICS But would such a new life form be unethical, giving terrorists the basic ammunition they need to create a new form of biowarfare? To answer those questions, a national debate is needed, most scientists agree. Microbiologist Dr. Frank Young, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, who is now at the Reformed Theological Seminary, said that Venter’s work provides us with new ammunition against terrorists. “In the viral terrorism field, there are always going to be new technologies developed by the noble that could be taken over by the bad guys,” he said. “But it is always better to know what we are dealing with than not to know. “With Venter’s advances, we can know within minutes, rather than days, what comprises a particular agent. The biggest deterrent to an enemy is to know rapidly what you are dealing with. “By the very nature of being able to identify it, we can defeat it.”
By Charlene Laino MSNBC ANAHEIM, Calif., Jan. 24
With the problem of organ shortage looming as great as ever, researchers are moving towards growing new tissue or even entire organs for transplantation. From sprouting new cartilage on smart grafts to building new hearts through genetic engineering, the field is fast graduating from an intellectual curiosity to a tool for treating medical ills.
Thought routine, transplantation of laboratory-grown organs into humans remains years away, the field is sprouting like never before. The ultimate goal, researchers say, is to take a small piece of a person’s own tissue and grow a “patch” or entire organ that is suitable for transplantation back into the patient.
Such an approach would eliminate problems related to rejection, which occurs when tissue or an organ is transplanted from one person to another, experts say. Moreover, the new methods are expected to be associated with less pain and fewer complications, while solving the problem of supply that now limits transplants of all kinds.
By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent
ANAHEIM, Calif. (Reuters)
Itemizing all the genes in potential biological weapons such as anthrax or bubonic plague could prevent extremists from ever using them against the United States, experts said Sunday. They called for a kind of bioterrorism genome project, similar to the Human Genome Project currently under way in which scientists are racing to map out, or sequence, every gene in the human body.
Having that information about pathogens at hand could help in the design of quick tests to detect an attack, and in the development of drugs to treat or vaccines to prevent infection, they told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ``If we have the genetic code of every pathogen and rapid detection methods ... it would act as a deterrent,'' J. Craig Venter, co-founder of Rockville, Maryland-based Celera Genomics Corp., told a news conference. ``It will tip the balance in favor of defense over offense,'' added Dr. Frank Young, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientist who is now at the Reformed Theological Seminary.
One of the most frightening things about biological weapons is their invisibility. An attacker could set loose airborne particles such as anthrax -- a deadly bacterium -- or perhaps a genetically engineered flu virus, using a device the size of a shoebox. The pathogens could float invisibly and silently, infecting hundreds of thousands of people in a busy area. The victims would carry away their infections and not know for days -- too late for treatment in the case of anthrax, and in the case of a virus such as flu, giving them a chance to infect thousands more.
Young said he worked at the Office of Emergency Preparedness in 1995 when hantavirus, a newly discovered virus, started killing people in the U.S. southwest. It took five days to determine that a natural virus was at fault and even longer to identify it. ``To sit there trying to manage an infectious outbreak, not knowing if it is man-made or natural, is terrible,'' he said. Young served on a committee of experts who advised President Clinton on the risks last year. Young said the odds of an attack were low. ``But the consequences are so high that for a nation not to be prepared is unthinkable,'' he said. Friday, Clinton asked Congress for more than $2.8 billion to defend against chemical and germ warfare and protect computer networks. That would include $1.39 billion for domestic readiness against an attack with weapons of mass destruction, $52 million of which would go for a national stockpile of vaccines, antibiotics and other medicines to protect the civilian population, and $611 million for training and equipping emergency personnel in U.S. cities. A further $206 million would go for research and development for vaccines against chemical and germ weapons, new therapies, detection and diagnosis, and decontamination.
Young said Clinton responded unusually quickly to the committee's recommendations. In only four months, ``seventy-five percent of the monies that we recommended have been funded,'' he said. ``That's like a hot knife going through butter in the bureaucracy.'' Venter, who was also on the committee advising Clinton, said using genome knowledge as a deterrent was one piece of advice they gave the president. ``What we argued is if we have the genome of every pathogen and every potential bioterrorism agent, we could quickly identify any hybrid organism,'' he said. Venter cited reports that suggested scientists in the former Soviet Union genetically engineered anthrax to resist current U.S. vaccines. Such genetic fiddling could be easily detected using speedy genome equipment. Letting potential attackers know the United States had that ability would discourage them from even trying to launch an attack. ``The more this information is public, the more it serves as a deterrent,'' Venter said.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - An outbreak of Japanese Encephalitis in Malaysia claimed its 14th victim after a pig farmer suspected to be suffering from the illness died Monday, a news report said. The 28-year-old man died at Ipoh Hospital, 120 miles north of Malaysia's capital city, after suffering from symptoms associated with the deadly mosquito-borne virus, state-run Bernama news agency said. Health authorities have been monitoring a rise of Japanese Encephalitis, which is believed to be passed to humans by certain mosquitoes that have bitten infected pigs. The disease claimed three lives in 1997, and seven last year, mostly in the northern state of Perak and Sarawak state on Borneo island.
The Environmental News Service has a follow-up to their report about multiple sightings around the U.S. of massive grid-work patterns in the sky being created by fleets of jets that fly back and forth and spray down a material that seems to make people ill.
In their follow-up [1], ENS interviews Thomas Farmer, an ex-Raytheon Missile Systems engineer who's been tracking the mysterious spraying incidents for over a year. Farmer has confirmed that jets used to spray are Air Force jets, and he's made several collections of the cobweb-like, or "angel hair," material the jets are spraying out, which made him, just like many others, sick after contact. It appears to be a substance used to seed (build) clouds.
ENS reports that Farmer is "fairly certain the contrail phenomena is one part of a military weather modification weapons system." The ENS report then observes that a sub- set of the military plan to use weather as a weapon and create a "Weather Force," is massive cloud-seeding that will work in with the HAARP antenna in Alaska, which is the U.S. military's primary weather-weapons system, which can exert effects on locations across the earth.
The openly-stated goal for the U.S. military is to "own the weather" [2] by year 2025 and to thereby be able to bring target populations to their knees by "storm enhancement," "storm modification," and being able to "induce drought." [1] So rather than natural laws of solar-heating and earth-rotation directing the weather, the weather will be determined by who is pleasing or displeasing our military masters, or then again, perhaps power does not really corrupt.
A U.S. military webpage [3] states that weather modification by the military is intended to allow for "storm triggering/enhancement using airborne cloud seeding." That military webpage also says:
"A global network of sensors provides 'weather warriors' with the means to monitor and accurately predict weather activities and their effects on military operations. A diverse set of weather modification tools allows manipulation of small- to-medium scale weather phenomena to enhance friendly force capabilities and degrade those of the adversary. Many of the sensors required for this system are assumed to be...part of the global information management system (GIMS)...
" Apart from allowing for an Orwellian-weather tyranny, military-weather control could lead to environmental catastrophe, since the desire to exert control will conflict with and overpower rational environment con- siderations, particularly if control is directed under the cover of military secrecy. Deliberate large-scale modification of the weather must be the most dangerous thing we could do to our planet, and it appears that military-weather-control planning is being done in secret, outside the realm of democratic oversight, just where it needs to be for the worst outcomes!
______________________________________________________
[1] Read The Full Environmental News Service Report "Mystery Contrails May
Be Modifying Weather" (1/12/99):
http://www.ens.lycos.com/ens/jan99/1999L-01-12-01.html
[2] Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025:
http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/research/ay1996/acsc/96-025ag.htm
[3] Military Weather Analysis and Modification System:
http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume4/chap03/b9_2.htm
After my first message on this topic one person replied saying the grid pattern of contrails appeared in their area in Idaho and 13 people (mostly old) died shortly there after. Another person responded saying they've seen unique grid-work contrail patterns in Georgia.
WASHINGTON, DC -- The United States government is spending $23 million to develop a killer fungus to wipe out marijuana plants -- a dangerous plan that could cause an environmental catastrophe, said the Libertarian Party today.
"This project is the political equivalent of athlete's foot fungus: It's nasty, it's dangerous, and it needs to be stopped before it spreads," said LP National Director Steve Dasbach. "The last thing we need is a bio-engineered killer fungus turned loose on the world."
Late last year, Congress passed legislation that authorized $23 million for research into soil-borne fungi called "mycoherbicides," which will attack and kill marijuana plants, poppy plants, and coca plants.
When developed, the fungus could be released in such South American countries as Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, said U.S. officials.
The legislation was guided through Congress by U.S. Representatives Bill McCollum (R-FL) and Mike DeWine (R-OH), who said the killer fungus was potentially a "silver bullet" in the War on Drugs. But Libertarians say the tax-subsidized fungus is a "biohazard" that could have a disastrous impact on the ecosystems of the target nations -- and, potentially, the whole world. "In the government's irresponsible search for a quick-fix in the War on Drugs, politicians could cause terrifying long-term ecological problems," warned Dasbach.
According to scientists, the killer fungus could... * Attack other plants, wiping out valuable cash crops. "For example, a chemical alkaloid similar to the one that produces cocaine is present in many legal plants -- including tobacco and coffee beans," said Dasbach. "In an effort to wipe out drugs, this killer fungus could wipe out the livelihood of millions of farmers." * Cause many plants to develop stronger chemical defenses against the fungus, which could then mutate and spread to other, harmful plants. "According to scientists, mutated plants could pass on these resistant genes and create herbicide-resistant weeds, which could have a ruinous effect on farm yields," he said. "With world hunger already a problem, why risk making it worse?" * Wipe out industrial hemp plants, which are legal in every major industrialized country outside the United States. "No fungus is smart enough to tell the difference between legal hemp and illegal marijuana," noted Dasbach. "This fungus could be the biological warfare equivalent of carpet bombing -- killing whatever is in its path.
" What should Americans do about this dangerous program? Tell their Congressional representatives to apply a strong dose of political fungicide to "cure" it, said Dasbach. "This tax-funded fungus should be treated like any dangerous mold or mildew -- exposed to sunlight and wiped clean. Congress should just say no to biological warfare."
Dasbach also said Libertarians have a better way to reduce the consumption of marijuana, with no environmental risks: Legalize it. In the Netherlands, he noted, where marijuana is decriminalized, drug use is half that of the United States. In fact, a new study revealed that while 32.9% of Americans have tried marijuana, only 15.6% of Dutch adults have done so.
"Treating adults like adults -- and letting them make decisions about how to live their lives -- seems to have a stronger anti-drug effect than any killer fungus," said Dasbach. "Wouldn't it be ironic if liberty was a more effective anti-drug program than deadly mycoherbicides?"
(AP) - Scientists have made a moving part out of a few strands of DNA, a step toward building incredibly tiny "machines" that could someday perform intricate jobs like building computer circuits and clearing clogged blood vessels in the brain. The hinge-like part, which bends on cue, is just four-ten-thousandths of the width of a human hair. The new work is not the first time scientists have turned chemical compounds into moving parts. But previous examples have been hampered by their floppy nature. The DNA device, however, is particularly rigid and executes motions 10 times bigger, lead researcher Nadrian C. Seeman said.
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) - First, radioactive ants, flies and gnats were found at the Hanford nuclear complex, which for years churned out plutonium for nuclear weapons. Now a government report says there has been a dramatic increase in the number of radioactive tumbleweeds found blowing around the place. The Department of Energy found 20 contaminated tumbleweeds in the first six months of 1998, compared with 11 during all of 1995, an increase likely due to stepped-up efforts to search the area. With roots that can stretch 15 feet into the soil looking for water, the weeds suck up contaminated groundwater and spread radioactivity when the top of the plant is blown away by the wind.
DECKERS, Colo. (AP) - A parasite is wiping out rainbow trout in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. The parasite is carried by a worm and causes whirling disease, which makes fingerling trout spin in circles until they die. Over the past few years, the disease has infected a number of prize rainbow trout streams in the West, including the Madison, the Yellowstone, the South Platte and even the Blackfoot, which was celebrated in the book and the movie "A River Runs Through It." German brown, cutthroat, brook and lake trout are less susceptible to the disease and are replacing the rainbow trout in many rivers.
POMONA, Calif. (AP) - Hundreds of people were quarantined for hours inside a nightclub after a phony anthrax threat, at least the seventh such hoax in Southern California this month. No trace of the potentially deadly bacterium was found in preliminary tests, authorities said Sunday. A Los Angeles County hazardous materials team and the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Task Force were called to the Glass House club at 11:50 p.m. Saturday after a man called the Police Department and said "a significant quantity" of anthrax would be released into the air, police said. If inhaled and then left untreated, anthrax spores can cause respiratory failure and death within a week.
DENVER (AP) - A disease that attacks the bone structure of young fish has wiped out 90% of Colorado's wild rainbow trout in six of the state's best trout streams, a state study shows. The study by the Colorado Division of Wildlife also found that Whirling disease has reached 12 of the state's 15 trout hatcheries, threatening the state's $420 million-a-year fishing industry. "It's like getting pounded by a sledgehammer. The disease is having a devastating effect," said Barry Nehring, state fishery biologist and author of the five-year study. "These were the best of the best rivers in Colorado." Whirling disease has killed millions of fish in such rivers as the Colorado, South Platte, Gunnison, Rio Grande, Cache la Poudre and Dolores.
Biology Index
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. government researchers said Tuesday they had developed a vaccine that protects monkeys from Marburg virus, a close relative of the feared Ebola virus. A team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., said their findings offered a little hope that perhaps a vaccine can be found against Ebola which, while extremely rare, is highly deadly. "This study eases doubt about Marburg virus, but similar success with Ebola virus vaccination has been elusive except in mice and guinea pigs," said Alan Schmaljohn, who worked on the study.
Biology Index
America’s fruited plain will yield another bumper crop this year, but it will be a harvest like no other. The genetic codes of roughly one-quarter of the corn and one-third of the soybeans grown this year have been altered resist herbicides or produce pesticides. Potato, tomato and squash crops have also been genetically engineered. The unknown dangers that might lurk inside these Frankenstein foods are enough to scare anyone. (CNN)
Biology Index
WASHINGTON(Reuters)- A new drug may kill a wide range of bacteria and viruses including deadly anthrax, which is considered a likely candidate for use as a biological weapon, researchers said Saturday. Columbia, Md.-based Novavax Inc. said its drug, known as BCTP, literally blows apart bacteria but does not seem to harm normal cells. The company and researchers testing BCTP presented what they said were promising studies at the American Society of Microbiology's Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Diego.
WILLITS, Calif. (Reuters) - A nasty stomach bug often associated with poor restroom hygiene made as many as 165 Californians sick in an outbreak linked to restaurant dining, Mendocino County officials said Wednesday. Carol Mordhorst, the county's public health administrator, said officials blamed shigella bacteria for the sudden rash of patients with severe nausea, high fevers, abdominal pain and dehydration. Since the first case was reported Sept. 15, four people have received hospital treatment for particularly severe symptoms and a total of close to 165 people have come down with shigella-like illness. Victims usually recover after a couple of days.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The federal government, an environmental group and a children's television show joined forces Tuesday to recruit children to help find out what is killing the nation's frogs. They set up an Internet web site devoted to the search and hope to commission thousands of schoolchildren as a nationwide "frog force" to try to save the disappearing amphibians. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said numerous studies show that frogs are dying in alarming numbers. Others are turning up with gross deformities. "The real questions are why now and why is this happening in so many places around the world?" Babbitt said at the kick-off of the new program.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Hundreds of U.S. military personnel have complained of symptoms characteristic of Gulf War illness even though they never served in that conflict, new research showed Tuesday. A study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 15% of 2,520 members of the Air Force had complained of symptoms similar to those associated with the mysterious medical affliction. None served in the 1990-91 U.S. military buildup and conflict against Iraq, the researchers said. The study of active-duty personnel, which began in 1994, also suggested that Gulf War illness among those who did serve in the conflict might be more widespread than first thought.
CARDIFF, England (Reuters) - All is not well in the animal kingdom and man is to blame for introducing rogue species into the environment, scientists said Thursday. American mink rampage around the British countryside in huge numbers, threatening the domestic water vole with extinction. Crayfish brought in to conquer a virulent fungus are eating their smaller brethren, and even the humble hedgehog is creating havoc among wading birds in the Outer Hebrides. David MacDonald of Oxford University told Britain's annual science festival that the American mink, introduced here for farming when furs were fashionable, was a supreme predator. But he said it had caused huge problems in the country.
Ice cold natural gas hydrates found deep within ocean sediment could provide a clean fuel for the future, British scientists said Monday. Hydrates look like veins of ice in deep sea mud and are made when methane, a natural gas, and water come together at high pressures and low temperatures. Although gas hydrates were discovered almost 30 years ago, they have only recently received attention as a potential energy source, researchers from the University of Leeds told a British science festival. Ocean drilling samples have given scientists samples of hydrates, but the scientists are not sure how stable the solid crystalline compounds are or how concentrated they are on the ocean floor. (Reuters)
An outbreak of more than 1,600 influenza and pneumonia cases in Alaska and the Yukon territory prompted federal health officials to issue a travel advisory Friday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said people over 65 years of age who have chronic medical conditions should consult with their physicians before traveling to the region. Dr. Martin Cetron of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases said at least 47 cases of pneumonia have been reported, and the death of one elderly woman may have been due to the outbreak. Researchers said the same Type A (Sydney) strain that dominated last winter's flu season caused the illnesses. (Reuters)
A little piece of genetic material that jumped into animals, perhaps from a microbe, may explain our complex and sophisticated immune system, researchers said Wednesday. They said they found important evidence of how this so-called "jumping gene" has made it into humans - explaining how our immune systems can fight off a huge array of viruses, bacteria and parasites. Writing in the science journal Nature, David Schatz and colleagues at Yale University said they think the gene, known as a transposon, may have acted like a virus, insinuating itself into the genetic material of whatever animal it infected 450 million years ago. (Reuters)
Many fish species, including perch, mullet and prized striped bass caught in coastal North Carolina waters show signs of infection by the toxic Pfiesteria microbe, scientists said Friday. Fishermen along the lower Neuse River, where the first Pfiesteria outbreak of the season in July killed an estimated 500,000 fish, reported bleeding and lesions on as much as 100% of their striped bass catch, the scientists said. Pfiesteria piscicida, a toxic marine organism linked to a major fish kill on the New River in 1991, may cause neurological, respiratory and skin ailments in people exposed to it. It has killed millions of fish in coastal North Carolina. (Reuters)
The dawn's early light may not be the only thing that triggers the body's internal
clock, U.S. researchers said Thursday - warmth from the rising sun may play
a big role as well. They said temperature may have an even stronger effect than
light on the body's internal cycles. "We do respond acutely to light-dark
cycles," said Jay Dunlap, professor of biochemistry at Dartmouth Medical
School in Hanover, N.H. "But they are not sufficient to completely drive
our behavior." An out-of-kilter body clock causes problems ranging from
jet lag to seasonal affective disorder, also known as "the winter blues.
(Reuters)
French doctors said Friday that they are puzzled by the outbreak of a disease that causes muscle and joint pains and fatigue. They don't know what is causing the mysterious illness, called macrophagic myofasciitis, that first appeared in 1993, but suspect that it may be the result of some sort of infection. Patients have no signs of muscle wasting, but laboratory tests have shown that many sufferers have muscle damage and inflammation. Doctors first suspected polymyalgia rheumatica, a form of rheumatism, or the muscle disease polymyositis which cause similar symptoms, but further examination ruled out both. (Reuters)
Romanian crop protection workers are trying to beat back swarms of locusts which have invaded large swathes of cropland sown to corn and sunflower in the River Danube delta, officials said Friday. An official with the plant protection inspectorate, speaking from Tulcea, said just over 7,500 acres had been crop-dusted against locusts. Swarms of mature locusts, 3-inches-long, flew into Romania over the northern arm of the Danube, on the border with Ukraine. They had attacked, but not destroyed, the crop and workers were spraying the area from aircraft. (Reuters)
Three African leaders have pledged to work together to combat a gruesome leprosy-related bacteria known as Buruli, which eats away flesh and is showing signs of spreading in the continent. Presidents Henri Konan Bedie of Ivory Coast, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana and Mathieu Kerekou of Benin threw their weight behind a World Health Organization plan to coordinate research and prevention at a conference which ends on Wednesday. "We are deeply concerned that very little is known about this disease," the three presidents said at the first International Conference on Buruli Ulcer Control and Research. (Reuters)
U.S. casualties come not from bullets, but from mysterious disease.WERE GIs
CONTAMINATED by fallout from the widespread American use against the Iraqis
— for the first time in warfare — of anti-tank shells and bombs made
from depleted uranium, a radioactive heavy metal that burns on contact?
The medical mystery behind Gulf war syndrome is a complex epidemiological maze
that will take years to fully unravel, if ever. But a sick soldier or sailor
is sick, whether due to stress or to some obscure illness that defies immediate
diagnosis. Why did the system fail the Gulf war veterans? Did national heroes
such as retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, who were known during
their careers for taking care of their troops, have an obligation to speak out
on behalf of the veterans and demand that America’s military hospitals
stop turning them away?
The unsettling fact is that the Gulf war was far more costly to the United States
than the Pentagon and its former leaders are willing to acknowledge. Well over
100,000 Gulf war veterans have registered thus far for physical examinations
at Pentagon and VA clinics, with nearly 90 percent reporting some symptoms.
Those men and women are friendly-fire casualties just as surely as if they had
been fired upon by their fellow soldiers. The military’s inevitable dilemma
is profound: Can it protect our soldiers and sailors in future wars if it was
unable to do so in the Gulf war? American soldiers were spared from Iraqi bullets
and artillery shells in the Gulf war, but not from toxic gases, mysterious viruses
and unknown diseases. For all of their brave talk about future warfare, the
men who run America’s military have been unwilling, perhaps even unable,
to learn the real lessons of the Gulf war. Colin Powell, for one, professes
no second thoughts
ORLAND PARK, Ill. (AP) - A form of the E. coli bacteria lurking in a popular
caterer's potato salad caused more than 4,000 people to fall ill, health officials
said. And in Georgia, a virulent form of E. coli sickened at least six children.
The Illinois case was the largest documented outbreak of the bacteria strain
called enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli in the United States, Cook County Health
Department officials said Monday.
The bacteria, known as ETEC and nicknamed ``traveler's diarrhea,'' was identified
in stool samples from three victims, said Dr. Stephanie Smith, the department's
director of communicable disease.
Officials from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were conducting
tests to isolate the bacteria in the food or water at Iwan's Deli and Catering
in Orland Park, a Chicago suburb.
A deadly virus claimed the lives of two more Taiwan children on Friday, pushing the death toll from the epidemic to 34, health officials and media reports said. Hsu Kuo-hsiung, acting director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Control said one child had died on Friday, killed by suspected enterovirus. State TV later quoted a hospital source as saying a second child had died in Tainan in southern Taiwan, bringing the toll to 34. Virologists said the airborne virus could infect adults, though it had only caused deadly complications among children. (Reuters)
A record-breaking heat wave blamed for brushfires that consumed dozens of houses in central Florida also caused fish kills in lakes all over the state, the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission said Monday. The majority of cases involve small ponds in residential areas and lakes near farmland, a biologist said. The biologists said the unusual heat - temperatures have been above 100 degrees in much of the state - and lower than usual rainfall have concentrated pollutants in lakes and ponds, increasing fish deaths. (Reuters)
About 100 people in at least seven states have become ill recently with an
unusual form of salmonella, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Six people in Illinois have been hospitalized in the past two months
with Salmonella agona infections. Because Salmonella agona is so unusual, doctors
suspect that the cases are from a single source, but have not yet
tracked that down. (CNN)
The federal government is boosting its ability to track foodborne illnesses from coast to coast. On Friday, officials unveiled a new computer database tracking system called PulseNet. It will eventually link agencies in all 50 states, enabling health officials to identify outbreaks five times faster than before. Officials estimate that foodborne pathogens -- such as E. coli, salmonella and others--contribute to an estimated 9,000 deaths and 33 million illnesses in the United States each year. (Reuters)
Virtually all strains of the common staph bacterium are now resistant to penicillin,
other bugs are rapidly developing drug-resistant forms and the costs are rocketing,
yet no one is tracking these "superbugs" in an organized way, disease
experts said Thursday. They said governments, doctors, drug companies and academic
researchers must join forces to find out where and why drug-resistant microbes
are emerging. "This is a global public health problem," said Dr. James
Hughes of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. Despite repeated warnings that some infections would emerge
no drugs could treat, no one has taken concerted action, he said, and the U.S.
government is not helping.
(Reuters)
A vast majority of American children are not being vaccinated against chickenpox, a disease that can be prevented with a single shot, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The vaccine was approved in 1995, but the CDC says only a fourth of children between 19 months and three years were vaccinated as of June 1997. A small number of children, about 43 a year, are still dying from the disease the can cause fatal complications such as pneumonia and blood infections. (CNN)
Virtually all strains of the common staph bacterium are now resistant to penicillin, other bugs are rapidly developing drug-resistant forms and the costs are rocketing, yet no one is tracking these "superbugs" in an organized way, disease experts said Thursday. They said governments, doctors, drug companies and academic researchers must join forces to find out where and why drug-resistant microbes are emerging. "This is a global public health problem," said Dr. James Hughes of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite repeated warnings that some infections would emerge no drugs could treat, no one has taken concerted action, he said, and the U.S. government is not helping. (Reuters)
A wave of rubella cases spilling over from Mexico is threatening to cause a widespread outbreak of the viral infection in Texas, state health officials said Friday. 35 cases have been confirmed in the state this year, compared with 12 in all of 1997, the Texas Department of Health said. It warned pregnant women planning trips to Mexico to consider postponing them if they have not had rubella or been vaccinated against it. The viral infection, also called German measles or three-day measles, is mild, but can cause birth defects, miscarriages and stillbirths if contracted by pregnant women. (Reuters)
The world's most powerful antibiotic failed to prevent the death last month of an elderly New York area man from a common bacteria, state health officials said Friday. They said the seriously-ill man fell victim to staphylococcus aureus, which resisted vancomycin, an antibiotic that is considered a drug of last resort and has generally kept the bacteria in check. The New York State Health Department said it was only the third such case of staphylococcus aureus with resistance to the antibiotic identified in the U.S. (Reuters)
New drug-resistant "superbugs," bacteria that defy all known antibiotics, are virtually certain to pop up soon unless doctors and hospitals crack down on procedures, health experts said Tuesday. Careless use of antibiotics and slipshod hygiene were almost certainly responsible for the rise of bacteria that resist the last-defense drugs - methicillin and vancomycin - they said. "We've seen dramatic increases ... in the past decade," said Dr. William Jarvis, acting director of the hospital infections program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. (Reuters)
A massive algae bloom known as "red tide" has killed 1,500 tons of
Hong Kong's farmed fish, an official said Monday. As environment workers battled
to dispose of rotting fish, the government warned beachgoers to keep out
of the water as the algae appeared off several popular beaches. Joseph
Sham, acting assistant director of fisheries, said the algae type was gyrodinium
and the current red tide was the most serious he had seen. "This is the
most serious red tide I have known,"
Sham said. Made up of microscopic organisms, the algae multiplies very quickly
and turns swathes of sea a reddish brown. (Reuters)
Cancer rates in Gulf War veterans may go underreported because of errors in the way the government accumulates data, according to a report Thursday by a congressional watchdog agency. Findings in a nine-month study by the General Accounting Office said government information on the health of Gulf War veterans cannot reliably estimate the incidence of tumors and other disease which may been caused by exposure to chemicals and other agents during the 1991 conflict. "This was due to the lack of record keeping and measurement before, during and after the deployment of troops, loss of key records, poor recall by veterans, and other factors," the report said. (Reuters)
Md. braces for return of Pfiesteria...4/9/98
The state of Maryland has started monitoring tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay for fresh outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, the warm-water toxic organism that plagued the Eastern Shore area last summer and autumn, officials said Thursday. A microbe known to biologists as a dinoflagellate, Pfiesteria killed millions of fish in three Chesapeake rivers in Maryland and Virginia, made people sick, cost the region's seafood industry $43 million in lost sales, and then disappeared when colder weather arrived last November. (Reuters)
Fourteen sailors and two Air Force enlisted personnel serving in the Persian Gulf have refused to be vaccinated for the biological warfare agent anthrax, apparently due to fears of possible health effects, CNN has learned. Two sailors have been dismissed from the Navy and one member of the Air Force has been reduced in rank for refusing the inoculation. A dozen other troops also face punishment. The vaccine has already been given to 15,000 Navy personnel in the Gulf. (CNN)
U.S. states issue more warnings about tainted fish...4/9/98
State warnings to sportsmen about unsafe fish have rapidly increased since 1993 because of danger from mercury, pesticides and other toxins, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said Wednesday. With fishing season beginning this month throughout much of the nation, the environmental group urged the federal government to help states control toxic emissions and to create a national database monitoring fish contamination.
Nationwide, state fishing advisories about contaminated fish soared more than 70% between 1993 and 1996.
(Reuters)
The World Conservation Union says 12.5 percent of the world's
seed-producing plants and ferns are threatened with extinction. The problem
is worse in the United States, where 29 percent of plants --16,000 species--are
said to be at
risk. The main reasons for the threat are loss of habitat and competition from
the introduction of non-native species. The group says its warning is the result
of a 20-year research effort. (CNN)
Seals in New Jersey have been dying in unusually high numbers from a mysterious disease that starts with a cough and a runny nose, a leading animal treatment facility said Wednesday.
The Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J., reported that one-third of the 31 seals brought to its facility this year have died so far.
That is more than double the usual mortality rate of 14%.
The disease has been found among all four local seal species - gray, harbor, harp and hooded. But hooded seals, an Arctic species that winters along the U.S. mid-Atlantic Coast, have had the worst of it. Only two of six hooded seals treated at the stranding center have survived. Reuters)
Biology Index
The World Health Organization highlighted a "global threat of tuberculosis"
Thursday and said 16 countries were hampering its efforts to control the infectious
lung disease by the year 2000.
"We believe we face a real global threat...," Dr. Carlyle Guerra de Macedo said. In 1991 the WHO launched a worldwide strategy called DOTS (Directly Observed Treatment, Short course) with the aim of controlling the illness by the millennium. But despite progress throughout most of the world, members of the WHO committee who met in London this week admitted they would not achieve their target. (Reuters)
Biology Index
The winter flu season peaked in the United States in early February, but influenza outbreaks are still being reported in more than two dozen states, federal health officials said Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said 27 states were reporting flu outbreaks during the week ending March 7, down from 39 a week earlier. Flu outbreaks were widespread in Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, the CDC said.
Outbreaks were occurring to a lesser extent in 18 other states. (Reuters)
Biology Index
In an animal experiment using pigs and mice, a group of researchers have found
that genetically engineered cells can be injected into cardiac muscle to
replace tissue killed by a heart attack.
The project, in which mouse heart cells were placed into the damaged heart of a pig, gives hope that the procedure may be used to grow and replace heart muscle in humans, says Dr. William C. Claycomb of the Louisiana State University Medical Center. He emphasizes, however, that the work is "in a very early experimental stage." (Reuters)
Biology Index
The Pacific water-warming phenomenon known as El Niño has already been blamed for massive flooding, fires, and unusually warm temperatures for many regions of the world. The warm and wet weather it brings may also mean a spread of tropical diseases.
Health specialists say the rainy winter has nourished all sorts of biological pests, from ants to bubonic plague. A week or two of 80-degree weather will push them out of hiding, said Joe Krygier, environmental health specialist for the San Bernardino County, California, vector control program. (Reuters)
Biology Index
Biological weapons are easily made and deployed, and the spread of anthrax and smallpox in a terrorist attack could spark an uncontrollable pandemic, an expert in infectious diseases said Tuesday.
"A chemical release or major explosion is far more manageable than a biological attack," said former World Health Organization (WHO) scientist D.A. Henderson. Henderson said if anthrax bacteria or the eradicated smallpox virus were unleashed, the number of victims would increase exponentially because the vast majority of people have no immunity to the long-dormant diseases they cause. (AP)
Biology Index
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned doctors to be vigilant to prevent an outbreak of a highly contagious strain of tuberculosis which can spread after only two hours of exposure.
The CDC, which released details of an outbreak in rural Ky. and Tenn. from 1994 to 1996 in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, said the aggressive strain has not reappeared since infected people were treated.
The new strain was first discovered in a preschool child in Tenn. who received a standard tuberculosis skin test. Her case was later traced to a 21-year-old uncle who suffered from a chronic cough. (Reuters)
Biology Index
A bacteria that in some forms eats flesh has killed 18 people in Texas in the past three months, the Texas Department of Health said Wednesday.
It said 89 cases of group A streptococcus were reported in the state since Dec. 1. Health Department spokesman Doug McBride said the state usually has only 80 to 100 cases a year, with an average of seven resulting in death. The latest victim was a 5-year-old Houston boy who died Sunday.
The bacteria is the same that causes "strep throat" and is treatable with antibiotics if caught in time. The Centers for Disease Control sent in epidemiologists to help study the outbreak. (Reuters)
Biology Index
The U.S. will spend about $375 million in developing defenses against chemical or biological attack in 1999, acting Air Force Secretary Whitten Peters said Friday.
Peters spoke after a showdown between the U.S. and Iraq over UN weapons inspections. Peters gave no details of the defense program. But he said air forces already had the ability to destroy some of Iraq's alleged chemical and biological arsenal if necessary. "We have the ability to take out factories. Some of the weaponry we currently have will generate enough heat to destroy the chemicals," he said. (reuters)
Biology Index
The El Nino weather phenomenon that is devastating crops and sparking fires in Southeast Asia is now being blamed as a leading cause of influenza and a contributor to plagues and revolutions throughout history.
A conference of leading Australian scientists on El Nino was told Friday the weather pattern contributed to the French Revolution, the Black Death of the late 1340s and major outbreaks of disease and could be a leading cause of influenza.
Richard Grove, convener of the El Nino History and Crisis conference, said major political and disease events were connected with El Nino in the past 5,000 years. (reuters)
Biology Index
It is done unconsciously, but when analyzed is an amazing feat. Just how do people remember where something is once they stop looking at it?
It turns out humans have a separate region in the brain used specifically for remembering the position of objects, researchers said Thursday.
"Spatial working memory is used when you are driving in your car and glance in the mirror to see the cars behind you, but you still know where the cars are in front of you," said Dr. Susan Courtney, who led the study at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). (reuters)
Malaria has killed 135 people since the start of the year on a southern Philippine island in one of the worst epidemics in the country's recent history, the health department said Friday.
"The death toll is rather heavy considering it happened in just a short period. I think it's one of the worst outbreaks in recent history," said Concepcion Roces, head of the department's epidemiology division.
Eighty-one other people have been diagnosed as having the mosquito-borne disease which has hit the remote island of Laminusa with a population of 12,000. Health Secretary Carmencita Reodica said medical teams have been sent in to spray houses against mosquitoes. (reuters)
Biology Index
An outbreak of malaria has killed 31 people in the southern Philippines and officials on Wednesday blamed bandits for frightening off health teams sent to kill mosquitoes in remote villages.
The Department of Health has sent medical teams to Siasi Island, 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Zamboanga, to contain the outbreak, which started in January, regional health director Lourdes Labiano said. Twenty-four villagers on the small island died last month and another seven on Sunday. (CNN)
Biology Index
Linguistic and physical evidence is mounting to show the first Americans migrated from Asia not 10,000 or 20,000 years ago but as long ago as 40,000 years ago, experts said Monday.
The first people to make the trek across what is now the Bering Strait from Asia into Alaska may have arrived before the last Ice Age covered North America with glaciers.
The discovery of a site apparently 12,500 years old in Monte Verde, Chile, has thrown the archeological world into an uproar. The site itself is 1,300 years older than the oldest known previous site - and it is 10,000 miles away from the onetime land bridge between Asia and Alaska. (Reuters)
New Zealand formally closed to visitors Thursday the sub-Antarctic Auckland and Campbell Islands, fearing humans may be at risk from a mysterious illness that has killed thousands of rare sea lion pups.
Conservation Minister Nick Smith said the islands, which were due to be visited by 1 domestic and 2 international tourist boats this month, would remain closed until the situation returned to normal. In the last week, many hundreds of Hooker sea lion pups have been found dead on and around the islands, which are breeding grounds for the threatened species.
Scientific tests have so far failed to establish what has caused the mass fatalities. (reuters)
Biology Index
Influenza outbreaks were occurring in 44 states and deaths from flu and pneumonia were at epidemic levels, federal health officials said Wednesday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 44 states, the District of Columbia and New York City reported regional or widespread flu activity during the week ending Jan. 24, the latest period for which figures were available.
Deaths from influenza and pneumonia in a sampling of 122 cities were at epidemic levels for the 3rd consecutive week, the agency said. (Reuters)
The toll of mysterious deaths among a threatened colony of sea lion pups mounted to over 1,200 Monday, and a leading environmental organization said the cause may be a serious issue for human health.
Department of Conservation staff wearing full-protection suits counted 1,071 dead seal pups on Dundas Island, one of the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands group, 200 miles south of New Zealand's southern tip. They estimated a 45% mortality rate on Dundas for pups born this year.
Very few dead adults were found. On nearby Enderby Island 137 dead pups were found, with an estimated mortality rate of 41% for pups. (Reuters)
Biology Index
Biologists were gathering tissue and blood samples Monday from the bodies of 71 dolphins that ran aground and died on Cape Cod beaches over the weekend.
"We still don't know why they beached themselves," said Sue Knapp, a spokeswoman for the New England Aquarium which has led recovery and rescue attempts. "We were able to herd back out to sea between 16 and 18 dolphins."
Cape Cod, Mass., juts out into the Atlantic and "has the most mass strandings of dolphins anywhere in the world," Knapp said. (Reuters)
U.S. health officials are warning travelers to Kenya and Somalia to protect themselves because of an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever that has killed as many as 300 people.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the outbreak has affected humans and domestic animals in remote parts of northeastern Kenya and southern Somalia, following continuing heavy rains.
The World Health Organization said there have been as many as 300 deaths in Kenya and an unknown number in Somalia. "Large losses of domestic animals, especially goats and cattle, are also reported," the CDC said. (Reuters)
January 17, 1998 Web posted at: 7:16 p.m. EDT (1916 GMT)
GARISSA, Kenya (AP) -- Dr. Saeed Abdalla was worried. In less than an hour, she had examined three people who showed symptoms of what appeared to be Rift Valley fever -- which has no cure and is creeping toward heavily populated regions of Kenya.
As Abdalla examined Ebla Hussein, the 40-year-old woman writhed in pain with a high fever. Relatives said she had been vomiting and her stool contained blood.
"This is the first time we have found cases so close to each other, and it is not a good sign," said Abdalla, a Red Cross doctor. "I fear the outbreak is worse than we think."
The Ministry of Health has confirmed more than 350 deaths since the fever initially known as "the mystery disease" broke out late last year. But the World Health Organization believes the actual figure may be double that, and said Saturday that the disease has spread from northeastern Kenya to coastal, eastern and central provinces.
The agency has warned visitors to protect themselves from the mosquitoes that ferry the fever-causing virus from infected animals to humans. Once infected, people have suffered symptoms including pain, fever and bleeding from the nose and gums, and have usually died within a week, she said.
Biology Index
The flu season is getting worse, with 15 states reporting influenza outbreaks, a 50% increase from a week earlier, federal health officials said Tuesday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said flu activity was widespread in New York, Tennessee and Texas during the week ended Jan. 3. Flu outbreaks were also reported in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Virginia, the CDC said. These 15 states reported flu outbreaks during the week ended Jan. 3. (Reuters)
Biology Index
A cholera outbreak in Malawi has killed 14 people in the northern district of Nkhata Bay on the shores of the country's biggest lake, a health official said Friday.
Health services controller, Chalamira Nkhoma, said 80 cases of cholera had been reported with 14 deaths since Dec. 1. "As of last week, the upturn of new cases has slowed," Nkhoma said. He said there was a danger of the cholera spreading.
He also said 470 cases of bubonic plague had been reported in central and southern Malawi but no deaths had been reported. (Reuters)
Biology Index
Physicist Richard Seed said Thursday he foresees as many as 200,000 human clones a year once his process is perfected, at a price for each clone far lower than the $1 million the first one will cost.
"When I was 7 years old I was brilliant and crazy. I don't mind being called crazy," the 69-year-old scientist said.
Seed said the initial market for human clones will come from the 10% to 15% of infertile couples who cannot conceive by methods like test tube fertilization or the use of surrogate mothers.
In the U.S., he said, that probably represents a maximum of 5,000 to 10,000 couples. See full story Cloning specter repels, fascinates humankind. (Reuters)
Over 140 dead dolphins have washed up on the coast of Venezuela's La Tortuga island in the Caribbean, authorities said Tuesday. Dead or dying dolphins were still arriving on the beach of the tiny island 19 miles from the mainland, but the cause was not known, a naval officer said.
An environmental group said it was unlikely to be because of man-made pollution because no other sea creatures had been affected. "The bodies have no wounds other than some reddish marks on the abdomen," said naval lieutenant Carlos Tarazona. "The strangest thing is they are already dead when they reach the shore." (Reuters)
A Chicago-area scientist is poised to start experiments on cloning human beings to create babies for infertile couples, National Public Radio (NPR) reported Tuesday.
It said Richard Seed, a physicist who has done fertility research in the past, was proposing setting up a clinic that would clone babies for would-be parents.
NPR said Seed had been negotiating with a Chicago area clinic, which it declined to name, that had all the equipment needed to try the procedure. Seed could not be immediately reached for comment. (NPR)
Biology Index
The World Health Organization said Tuesday that Rift Valley fever was believed to be the "major cause" of 300 reported deaths in Kenya and Somalia.
Dr. David Heymann, director of WHO's division of emerging and other communicable diseases, said the outbreak had been sparked by flooding but appeared to be contained.
Rift Valley fever, endemic to Africa, south of the Sahara desert, is transmitted by mosqitoes and can be transmitted through contact with infected animals. In humans it can produce a non-fatal disease like dengue fever. (Reuters)
Biology Index
Mexican archaeologists have made an important find of rare Mayan objects that prove the early settlement of the country's Caribbean coast, the government said Friday.
About three hundred objects, many of them fine jade carvings, were found in two burial offerings at the Muyil archaeological site in the southern state of Quintana Roo, the National Institute of History and Archaeology said.
"These document for the first time in a solid way the very early occupation by humans of a site on the coast of the state," the government institute said in a statement. The objects date from 200 to 600, it added. 1/2/98 (Reuters)
Government workers fanned out through Hong Kong on Monday as part of an operation to kill all of the territory's 1.3 million chickens to halt a deadly virus that has triggered fears of a worldwide epidemic.
Armed with large plastic containers and tanks of carbon dioxide, workers from the Agriculture and Fisheries Department also will kill all ducks, geese, quail and caged pigeons in a bid to rid the territory of the mysterious "bird flu" that has killed four people.
The department's workers will put the birds in the containers, kill them by pumping in carbon dioxide, sterilize their remains and finally dump them in the territory's eight landfill sites. 12/29/97 (Reuters)
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(Reuters) A deadly strain of malaria has killed 143 people in northeastern Kenya in the last three months, provincial commissioner Maurice Makhanu said on Tuesday.
Newspapers reported on Tuesday that a "mystery disease" with symptoms of fever, diarrhea and bleeding from the nose and mouth had struck Kenya's northeast province, raising fears of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus.
But Makhanu said Kenya Medical Research Institute officers had confirmed it was malaria. Malaria is endemic to Kenya, but recent heavy rains caused in part by the El Nino weather effect have significantly increased the incidence.
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A deadly "bird flu" claimed its 3rd victim Sunday, a 13-year-old girl, as health experts tried to contain the virus before it spreads. The H5N1 virus was found only in birds until May. The total number of cases remains 8, 3 who have died.
There are 2 other suspected cases. The leading flu expert of the World Health Organization arrived in Hong Kong over the weekend to join the investigation of the virus and help determine if it was spreading human to human, the first sign of an epidemic. Dr Daniel Lavanchy said the WHO and collaborating centers were preparing special viruses necessary to develop a vaccine. (Reuters)
(Reuters) East Africa faces the risk of a serious cholera epidemic, with more than 2,500 people already dead from the disease this year and infection rates rising sharply in the last month, a World Health Organization (WHO) official said Friday.
The region is particularly vulnerable to the disease, say health officials. Not only is it one of the poorest areas of the world, but wars and ethnic conflicts from Somalia to Rwanda have also displaced hundreds of thousands of people. With poor sanitation, the populations of the region's refugee camps and slums are most at risk.
Biology Index
BOSTON(Reuters) - It was only a scratch on the edge of a young doctor's palm but it was enough for an infection of flesh-eating bacteria, according to a letter in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
Three doctors at the University of Texas and the Houston Medical Center said the case showed the infection, known as necrotizing fasciitis, can be an occupational hazard for those practicing medicine.
``Even though the injury appeared minor, the infection progressed rapidly and required aggressive therapy,'' said doctors Carin Hagberg, Adriana Radulescu and John H. Rex.
Fourteen hours after the scratch suffered when the young woman doctor was putting a tube into a patient, the area was hard, red and painful. She quickly developed fever and chills, and was given an antibiotic. More antibiotics were added when the doctor discovered the patient had died from group A streptococcus, which can develop into a flesh-eater, and the infection began spreading up her left arm.
Surgery was eventually needed to remove rotting flesh in the doctor's hand and a muscle flap was used to replace the rotted tissue that had been cut away. The doctor survived, according to the report, but only after 17 days in a hospital.
``Invasive disease due to group A streptococcus is a potential hazard for those in the medical profession, especially those who perform invasive procedures,'' the team of doctors said.'' ^REUTERS@
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ATLANTA(Reuters) - The Centers for Disease Control is sending a team of epidemiologists to Hong Kong Friday to investigate a strain of flu that usually hits birds but has infected humans for the first time.
A CDC spokeswoman said the agency did not believe there was a link between the two flu victims, both children and both from Hong Kong. The likely source of the virus was chickens.
``The only thing we know is they (the two flu cases) are not similar in terms of coming from the same source,'' Barbara Reynolds told Reuters Wednesday. She said Hong Kong had experienced a flu epidemic among ducks and chickens.
The World Health Organization confirmed the second case of influenza A, strain H5N1 in a human Tuesday. That case involved a 2-year-old boy hospitalized in November who has since recovered. The first victim, a 3-year-old boy, died in May of complications associated with Reye's syndrome.
Reynolds said the CDC has no records on whether the same strain of avian flu affects birds in other areas of the world.
``We don't study animals unless they start messing with humans,'' she said. ``Our concern here is to keep track of any new or emerging viruses that have undergone an antigenic shift.''
She said the CDC was vigilant about investigating new viruses and those that cross from animals into humans because ''we have a world population not immune to them.''
Reynolds stressed there was no indication the avian virus has yet been transmitted by human-to-human contact, but the CDC epidemiologists would examine whether that could happen because of the potential for a pandemic, or worldwide flu epidemic. ^REUTERS@
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SEATTLE (Reuters) - A study of salamanders in Oregon's Cascade mountains provides new evidence that depletion of the Earth's ozone layer is behind an alarming worldwide decline in amphibians, scientists said Monday.
More than 90 percent of long-toed salamander embryos left exposed to the sun's natural ultraviolet rays either failed to hatch or were born with physical deformities, scientists said in a report of an experiment conducted last spring.
By contrast 95 percent of embryos protected from the so-called UV-B radiation survived, and only 0.5 percent of those that hatched were deformed. Results of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the experiment, 200 salamander embryos in a pond near Sisters, Ore., were protected from the sun's UV-B rays by acetate filters, while 200 control embryos were placed under filters that let through 90 percent of the ambient ultraviolet radiation. Of the 200 embryos left unprotected only 29 hatched, and 25 of those had deformities including curved tails, blistering and swollen, fluid-filled areas.
Andrew Blaustein, a professor of zoology at Oregon State University in Corvallis and lead author of the study, said the results were startling to scientists because the salamander embryos in the study were exposed only to natural sunlight.
``We didn't enhance any UV levels or make any changes except to shield some embryos,'' he said. ``We suggest that ozone depletion and increased UV is probably playing a role in the decline in amphibian species.'' A widespread decline in the numbers of some amphibians and even the extinction of some species has been reported since the late 1980s, especially in Australia, the Western United States and Central and South America.
The declines are particularly alarming to scientists because amphibians are seen as sensitive indicators of environmental stress and change.
Blaustein said increased levels of ultraviolet radiation caused by ozone depletion also is believed to be responsible for damage to coral reefs, a decline in some species of fish and a loss of plankton in waters surrounding Antarctica, where ozone depletion is most severe.
(Webmaster comment: Plankton create 70% of the earth's oxygen!)
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GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - A recent whooping cough outbreak killed 17 rural Guatemalans who did not get vaccinations because they spent the country's long civil war hiding in the mountains, officials said on Thursday.
``These are people who are returning from the mountains where they hid during the war. That is why for many years they have not been vaccinated,'' Mario Gudiel, Director of the General Health Services Department, told Reuters.
The epidemic, which began in mid-November, claimed the lives of 16 children under five years old and one 85-year-old woman in the Indian town of Ilom, in the north of Quiche province, near the border with Mexico, Jacobo Finkelman of the Pan American Health Organization, told Reuters.
Finkelman said 324 people, including many teenagers and adults got the whooping cough, showing the community had not received any regular vaccinations for up to 45 years.
Guatemala's 36-year civil war ended last year with a historic peace treaty between the government and leftist rebels. During the early 1980s the army's brutal counterinsurgency campaigns drove many Indian peasants into hiding in the mountains, where they lived in isolation.
Biology Index
By Mike Cooper
ATLANTA (Reuters) - The largest outbreak of human monkeypox ever reported has caused more than 500 people to become ill in the Democratic Republic of Congo, health officials said Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said children 16 and under accounted for 85 percent of the 511 human monkeypox cases that have occurred in the former Zaire since February 1996.
The CDC said it was the largest human monkeypox outbreak ever recorded. Five deaths were recorded, all of them of children aged between 4 and 8. Monkeypox is a sister virus of smallpox and is generally spread by squirrels and monkeys in the rain forests of western and central Africa.
Before the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cases of monkeypox in humans were rare.
Dr. Brian Mahy of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases said the outbreak does not suggest that the virus has become more virulent. ``We don't think that the virus has changed in any noticeable way since the early 1980s,'' he said.
The increase in monkeypox cases may have occurred because of a combination of exposure to animals and the end of smallpox vaccination programs after the illness was eliminated in 1980. The smallpox vaccine also protected against monkeypox.
``We know that there's been a lot of rebel fighting and disturbance in that area, which may have resulted in people going out of their houses to the bush a little bit more,'' Mahy said. ``That could provide much greater contact with the animals from which this disease is normally acquired.''
Monkeypox resembles smallpox, causing fever, swollen lymph nodes, respiratory illness and pus-filled blisters on the skin. There is no cure for the still rare and generally nonfatal viral disease, which generally lasts about a week.
Mahy said the outbreak of monkeypox does not suggest a resurgence of smallpox, which was eliminated worldwide in 1980. ''It is clearly quite different from smallpox, and it is not the sort of virus that could mutate into smallpox. There are major, major differences between the two,'' he said.
Last week the World Health Organization said it was not urging the reintroduction of smallpox vaccination programs in Africa to prevent monkeypox. Instead, it recommended limited contact with animals caught in the wild and with people who are believed to have become infected.
Biology Index
Sunday, October 19, 1997
The Seattle Times NEWS
LONDON - Brittish scientists have created a frog embryo without a head
which may lead to production of headless human clones to grow organs and
tissue for transplant, The Sunday Times reportes.
The Times said people needing transplants could have organs "grown to
order"
from their own cloned cells. The organs would genetically match the patient,
eliminating rejection. It would also ease the shortage of organs for transplant.
Growing partial embryos could bypass legal and ethical concerns, because
without a brain or central nervous system, the organisms may not technically
qualify as embryos.
But some scientists accused the Bath University embryologists of meddling
with nature. "It's scientific fascism, because we would be creating
other beings whose very existence would be to serve the dominant group",
Oxford University ethicist Andrew Linzey said.
Biology Index
Tue, 14 Oct 1997 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Brain works much like an FM radio when it intreprets touch, Israeli scientists reported Monday.
They said tests on rats showed brain cells use a kind of frequency modulation -- the same method used by FM radio signals.
"We found that certain circuits in the brain work on the same principle as an FM radio", Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute in Rejovot said in a statement.
"We hope that our study will contribute to the deciphering of the neural code, the way in which information is encoded by the sensory organs and decoded by the brain."
Radio waves carry information in two ways. Frequency modulation (FM) involves changing the frequency with which radio waves oscillate, while amplitude modulation (AM) changes the height of the waves.
Radio sets interpret these small changes, which can carry the information that we hear as music or speech.
Similarly, the brain contains cells that oscillate at certain frequencies. Ahissar's team said they found the brain uses these cells as a yardstick to help it interpret the timing of incoming signals.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is based in Washington DC, they gave as an example, a finger rubbing a piece of corduroy. Each ridge is a set distance from the next; the thinner and closer the ridges, the more frequent the signal.
Nerve endings in the finger send that signal to the brain.
"The timing of the sensory signals appears to be an inherent part of the sensory code," Ahissar said. "In fact, this timing contains so much information aobut the external world that it would be surprising if the brain made no use of it".
Testing rats, Ahissar's team found their whiskers -- an important sensory organ for rats -- twitched at a frequency of about 8 motions per second or 8 Hertz. when they touch something, additional signals are triggered that modulate that 8 Hz signal.
These signals are sent to the oscillating brain cells. The brains of primates contain similar oscillating cells, which are tuned to the characteristic frequencies generated when the fingertips rub against an external object," Ahissar said.
They are now testing to see if the brain uses similar methods to decode visual input.
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