Posts tagged bioweapon

A man in southern China has died of bird flu a week after being admitted to hospital with a fever, state media reports.

The 39-year-old bus driver from Guangdong province contracted the first human case of bird flu in China in 18 months.

The man from Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, developed symptoms last week and was admitted to a hospital on Christmas Day because of severe pneumonia, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The report added the man died in the early afternoon on Saturday (local time), after having tested positive for the H5N1 virus.

Guangdong’s official newspaper, the Southern Daily, said 120 people who had contact with the man had developed no signs of sickness.

About 10 days ago Hong Kong culled 17,000 chickens at a wholesale poultry market and suspended all imports of live chickens from mainland China for 21 days after a dead chicken there tested positive for the H5N1 virus.

The virus is normally found in birds but can jump to people who do not have immunity to it.

Researchers worry it could mutate into a form that would spread around the world and kill millions.

In recent years, the virus has become active in various parts of the world, mainly in east Asia, during the cooler months.

Authorities in China are worried about the spread of infectious diseases around this time when millions of Chinese travel in crowded buses and trains across the country to go home to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

The current strain of H5N1 is highly pathogenic, kills most species of birds and up to 60 per cent of the people it infects.

Since 2003, it has infected 573 people around the world, killing 336.

The virus also kills migratory birds but species that manage to survive can carry and disperse the virus to new, uninfected locations.

It transmits less easily between people but there have been clusters of infections in people in Indonesia and Thailand in the past.

Reuters/AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

The World Health Organisation is warning of the potential for an untreatable form of tuberculosis to develop on Australia’s doorstep.

It says infections of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) in Papua New Guinea’s remote south-west have reached crisis levels.

The country’s health minister says tuberculosis is now a greater health emergency than HIV/AIDS.

Dr Catharina Van Weezenbeek, from the World Health Organisation, says it is now clear the problem is in a state of emergency.

“If you just look at the numbers of MDR TB cases, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a crisis,” she said.

“Children 14-years-old infected with MDR TB in a family with already five patients dying.”

A research team from WHO found the rural health centres are rundown with very limited or no medical supplies.

There is no TB coordinator in the region so no one is monitoring patients to ensure they stick to the lengthy treatment of drugs required to beat the disease, meaning many do not.

WHO’s Dr Donald Enarson says that has led to the emergence of MDR TB.

“Multi-drug resistance has passed from being created from bad treatment to now being established in a community by itself and spreading among community members,” he said.

Local medical records show 94 people have contracted MDR TB in Western Province since 2005.

But the records are incomplete and WHO suspects those cases are just the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

The organisation’s MDR TB expert, Dr Ernesto Jaramillo, says the situation has the potential to get much worse.

“When treatment is delivered under the current conditions which many patients are having, then it’s a matter of months or years before we have forms of TB that cannot be cured,” she said.

Clinics closed

Half the identified cases of MDR TB were treated at tuberculosis clinics in the Torres Strait which is just a short boat ride across the maritime border with Australia.

Earlier this year Queensland’s Department of Health said it would close the clinics because of a funding dispute with the Federal Health Department.

Australian tuberculosis experts have criticised the move as irresponsible.

But Dr Van Weezenbeek says despite the best of intentions, the treatment of PNG nationals across the border has contributed to the emergence of MDR TB.

“The cross border is, in fact, is complicating the situation. In fact most of those patients are being lost,” she said.

PNG’s health minister Jamie Maxtone-Raham responded to WHO’s report by saying TB is now a greater health risk than the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“It’s very frightening,” he said. “HIV/AIDS is more confined to people who are active, sexually active. But multi-drug resistant TB, the whole home is all at risk.”

Australia’s aid agency AusAID has provided $1 million to improve health facilities in Western Province before the Torres Strait clinics close.

The money is being used to train and recruit medical staff, to purchase a boat for outreach programs, and to construct a TB ward at the hospital on Daru Island.

A gradual clinical handover of PNG patients being treated in the Torres Strait is underway but an AusAID spokesman says they won’t be transferred if there’s no treatment support in their local area.

A decision on whether to keep the clinics open will be made in January.

Despite the dire warning of the potential for an untreatable form of tuberculosis to develop, Dr Van Weezenbeek is confident MDR TB can be contained.

“We have the measure and momentum now,” she said.

“We have Australian Aid assisting. We have technical assistance of all the partners. We have commitment of the PNG government. We have very committed and competent people now in place.”

(Source: abc.net.au)