Plagues and pestilence

By Carl

Well, when you weren't looking, yet another nasty bug pops up on the radar...

BEIJING — Officials have sealed off an isolated town of 10,000 people in rural west-central China after an outbreak of pneumonic plague killed two residents, the state-run Xinhua news service reported on Monday.

An official who answered the emergency line at Renmin Hospital in Ziketan, where the outbreak is centered, said that all roads into and out of the area had been closed off, but that residents remained free to move about within the town. The official, who refused to give his name, said it was unclear when the blockade would be lifted. Repeated calls to a plague emergency phone line produced only busy signals.

Pneumonc plague is airborne, as opposed to its cousin, the bubonic plague, which is transferred by flea bites. It usually occurs in rural areas (the US has about 15 cases a year) where bacteria forms in the dung of livestock and then is aerosolized in some fashion. Without the proper treatment, antibiotics within 24 hours of symptoms appearing, the disease is nearly 100% fatal.

So now we're tracking swine flu, avian flu, the plague and in addition to all these, there's a new form of HIV floating around, which will upend current scientific assumptions:

Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been identified in an African woman and researchers say it appears to be the first to be transmitted to humans from gorillas instead of chimpanzees.
The 62-year-old woman infected with the new strain of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, comes from the West African nation of Cameroon and now lives in Paris. She has no symptoms of AIDS, according to today’s report in the journal Nature from researchers at the University of Rouen in France.

The new strain, known as HIV-1, group P, is different enough from three previously identified strains that it can’t be detected by conventional laboratory tests, said Paul Sharp, a geneticist who studies AIDS at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The new form of the virus is unlikely to spread to large numbers of people, he said.

Sharp goes onto say that he doesn't believe this strain will be widespread or highly infectious. Then again, in the early 1980s, scientists thought AIDS was some "gay plague" limited only to unprotected sex.

When even keeping your hands clean can promote getting sick, you know things are a bit scary.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

H1N1, anyone?

By Carl

I've deliberately stayed away from the swine flu story this week because frankly, apart from the Mexico crisis, it doesn't seem to be that virulent.

Already, 70 cases have been reported in the US, with the first death in Texas, a toddler, the typical fatality in a flu epidemic.

Although the WHO and the US are taking steps to treat this as a pandemic, and there's evidence to believe that while they are being cautious, they are not being alarmist, there are reasons to think that this is being blown a little out of proportion by the global media.

For one thing, this is not the first swine flu outbreak in the US. And like that epidemic, there are strains of the avian flu mixed in the virus. It will be bad (I had that flu: nasty little bug) but it should be a fairly short-lived matter, perhaps two or three months for it to work its course.

So of course, I urge you to stay healthy, wash your hands frequently, and if you know someone from California or Mexico or New York City (or live there), be extra careful in keeping yourself from catching anything.

And cross your fingers.

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)

The pecking order has changed

By Carl


It appears that avian flu has begun its migration to mammals:

The father of a Chinese man who died of bird flu has also been infected with the virus, raising fear of human-to-human transmission.

The World Health Organization said it could not rule out the possibility that the H5N1 virus had spread from the son to the father.

For the most part, humans have caught the virus from sick birds.

Scientists fear if the virus gains the ability to pass easily between humans, tens of millions of people could die.

A statement on the Chinese ministry's website said a 52-year-old man in eastern Jiangsu province identified only by his surname, Lu, has been confirmed with the virus, just days after his 24-year-old son succumbed to it on 2 December.

Members of the same family have died before, but it's been difficult to tell whether it was human-to-human contagion or contact with affected birds, since the family members have all had interactions with their bird stock.

In this case, however, there is no clear non-human link to the virus, ratcheting up the probability of mammalian adaption by the virus. If so, we're talking about the possibility of an outbreak at least as severe as the Hong Kong Flu of 1968, and perhaps as virulent as the Spanish Flu of 1918.

In both cases, it took from seven to ten years between the first recognized avian outbreak until the virus became activated in mammals. In the case of the Hong Kong flu, it skipped the intermediate mammalian outbreak to attack humans directly, so we might not get a warning when the avian flu epidemizes.

Ironically, the Hong Kong flu hit American shores from returning troops ending their tours of duty in Viet Nam, and here we are, debating ending yet another war in Asia and bringing troops home. Osama might be rubbing his hands in glee.

The death rates for the Hong Kong flu were low. Of 50 million reported cases in the US, for example, 33 thousand people died. The death rates for the Spanish flu were tragically high: 50-100 million estimated dead, with about twice that number reporting the disease (or symptoms just like it...hospital records are incomplete).

Right now, the avian flu mortality rate is skewing towards the high end of this scale. For example, in China, 26 cases have been reported, with 17 fatalities. A total of 200 people worldwide have died of the avian flu.

And then there's Ebola...

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)