Month: June 2013

Highlights include BioWatch’s murky future, MERS in hospitals, norovirus at Yellowstone, the WHO simplifying its alert mechanisms, and ricin in Spokane. Happy Friday!

BioWatch Gen-3 may be too costly, CDC official says

The beleaguered BioWatch program faced congressional hearings this week. Congress has refused to authorize the $40 million President Obama requested for the program, citing ongoing concerns over rising costs and program efficacy. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations chairman Murphy expressed skepticism on the program’s ability to detect pathogens, claiming that the United States is  less prepared to handle a bioterrorist attack today than it was five years ago (we disagree, but to each their own we suppose). We do agree, however, that cutting funding for public heath departments is definitely not helping preparedness.

Fierce Markets – “Once the technology is rolled out, it’s unclear what the burden would be on public health agencies at all levels of government, Merlin said during the hearing, held by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations. Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), the subcommittee chairman, said he was concerned about the cost of BioWatch, especially considering the cuts to public health agencies in recent years. At the state and local level, more than 46,000 health department jobs have been lost since 2008.”

Investigation Follows Trail of a Virus in Hospitals 

The mechanism of infection with the Middle Eastern Respiratory Virus is being carefully examined, with useful and interesting results. According to a recent study by the New England Journal of Medicine, it takes approximately 5.2 days for prodromal symptoms to appear in the average person following infection with MERS. The study also revealed that one person was able to infect seven others. While some scientists believe the virus may be less pathogenic than originally believed, public health officials continue to monitor it closely.

New York Times – “A detailed investigation of the viral illness first detected last year in Saudi Arabia has revealed the chilling ease with which the virus can spread to ill patients in the hospital — and its ability to infect some close contacts like hospital staff and family members who were in good health…The apparently high death rate from the disease has worried health experts. More than half of the confirmed cases have been fatal. However, it is possible that milder cases have gone undetected and that the disease is not as deadly as it may initially appear, said Dr. Trish M. Perl, an author of the new report, and a senior hospital epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who traveled to Saudi Arabia to investigate the outbreak.”

Virus sickens 200 at Yellowstone, Grand Teton parks

Summer is finally here (almost) which naturally means norovirus is busy ruining all sorts of vacation plans. This time it’s campers at Yosemite and Grand Teton parks, with almost 200 campers and park employees. Norovirus is notoriously  contagious, and is able to remain infectious as a fomite for months on door handles and common spaces.

Reuters – “The rare health advisory, tied to a suspected outbreak of the highly contagious norovirus, comes in the early weeks of a season that drew about 6 million people to the parks last year. A tour group visiting Yellowstone, home to the Old Faithful geyser, first complained June 7 of symptoms linked to norovirus, the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

WHO simplifies pandemic alert system

After receiving severe criticism for its management of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the World Health Organization has revised its pandemic alert system. Within the new systems, the focus of the alert has shifted from raw numbers to potential risk. The new system uses just four phases, ranging from interpandemic to transition (post pandemic) to describe pandemic progression in place of the prior seven.

Courier Mail – The WHO announced H1N1 swine flu had reached pandemic proportions on June 11, 2009, first sparking panic-buying of vaccines and then anger when it turned out the virus was not nearly as dangerous as first thought. Swine flu killed more than 18,449 people and affected some 214 countries and territories, but the world had been bracing for far worse, and governments stuck with millions of unused vaccine doses were especially upset. In March 2011, a WHO evaluation committee called on the organisation to simplify its description of a pandemic to make it more precise and consistent and to assess the risks and severity of a pandemic.

Spokane man charged with sending ricin-laced letters

Matthew Ryan Buquet of Spokane, Washington has been charged with “developing and sending poison-laced letters”  (ricin is a toxin, but moving along) to President Obama, the CIA and others. Rather than have us wax lyrical about the nature of the ricin threat, check out Charles Blair of FAS and GMU  excellent piece on the subject here.

The Spokesman Review – “Federal prosecutors Wednesday charged a 38-year-old Spokane man with developing and sending poison-laced letters to President Barack Obama and a federal judge in Spokane.The court documents say Matthew Ryan Buquet produced ricin, an illegal biological toxin, and mailed the substance in threatening letters between April 29 and May 14. He was arrested May 22 after agents raided his Browne’s Addition apartment. He is jailed without bond on the charges as the case unfolds.”

It’s been a slower week for biodefense news – highlights include ricin – barely lethal?, MERS update, the Australia Group and Syria, stopping bacterial cell division, and the ongoing H1N1 outbreak in Venezuela. Happy Friday!

Ricin: Barely Lethal?

GMU Adjunct Faculty member and FAS Senior Fellow for State and Non State Threat Charles Blair comments on the true nature of the ricin threat in his thought-provoking column with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – “The June 7th arrest of actress Shannon Richardson for allegedly sending ricin-tainted letters to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama comes after two other ricin-related incidents earlier this year. In May, five letters testing positive for the toxin were mailed from Spokane, Washington, with one each bound for an Air Force base, a local judge, and the Central Intelligence Agency, and two addressed to the White House. All were intercepted and authorities arrested a suspect. In April, another alleged perpetrator PDF mailed letters containing ricin to a US senator, a Mississippi judge and, once again, the White House. In short, more individuals have used ricin in the past three months than in any three-month period ever before. So what explains ricin’s growing use? The answer is two-fold.First, though the toxin is difficult to weaponize for mass casualty attacks, it is relatively easy to produce on a small scale. The ease of acquisition and manufacture strengthens the allure of the poison for those seeking revenge or public attention. Second, ricin exerts a strong cultural pull on its users.”

MERS has potential to cause pandemic, WHO says

The WHO has issued health alerts for MERS, H7N9, and H5N1 in recently released guidance based on lessons learned from the H1N1 2009 pandemic. The case number for MERS continues to grow, with another two fatalities in the last day. The source of the virus is still unknown.

NBC News – “The United Nations agency, which issued new, long-awaited guidance to countries on influenza pandemics, said the world was also in the same “alert phase” for two human strains of bird flu – H5N1, which emerged a decade ago, and H7N9, first detected in China in March. ‘International concern about these infections is high, because it is possible for this virus to move around the world. There have been now several examples where the virus has moved from one country to another through travelers,’ the WHO said of MERS, which causes coughing, fever and pneumonia.”

Chair of Australia Group Comments on Syrian Chemical Weapons Use

The Australia group is a informal consortium of states participating in voluntary export controls of materials which may be used to develop biological or chemical weapons. In a statement released following the conclusion of the Group’s annual Plenary meeting, the Group called on all states to participate in similar voluntary export control to prevent the further or future proliferation of weapons materials.

Press Release – “Australia Group members are gravely concerned by the growing body of evidence pointing to the use of chemical weapons and by the danger of more and larger-scale use. The threat of chemical weapon use on the people of Syria underlines the necessity for the complete eradication of chemical weapons for all time and for the universalisation of the CWC…The Australia Group underlined that the use of chemical weapons under any circumstances is unacceptable and against the legal norms of the international community. The Group urged support for the UN mission to investigate all allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria”.

Compound Freezes Bacteria Mid-Division

Developing antibiotics is unsurprisingly a pretty trick affair, with the complexity of bacterial cell division being a big part of the difficulty. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have found a molecule capable of throwing a figurative wrench in bacterial division. The discovery of the molecule, an enzyme inhibitor named divin, may help develop more effective antibiotics.

Chemical and Engineering News – “When a bacterium divides in two, it enlists a cast of more than a dozen proteins to help. The proteins assemble at the dividing line, arriving either in an early phase or a late one. And basically, that’s where biologists’ understanding stops…To help solve the mystery, Weibel and colleagues searched for small molecules that could gum up the works of these division proteins. Using a high-throughput screening process, they found divin, a weak inhibitor of an enzyme called MipZ that coordinates where the cell splits in two. The researchers tested divin’s effect on cell division by treating Caulobacter crescentus bacteria with the molecule. They saw something they’d never seen before: The cell starts to divide, but the two daughter cells never separate.”

H1N1 flu cases rise sharply in Venezuela

Venezuela’s H1N1 outbreak continues apace, with a sixty percent increase in case numbers in the last week.  The total numbers of laboratory confirmed cases is now at 1,138.  However, throughout May Venezuelan health authorities vaccinated nearly three million people, leading local health authorities to describe the situation as “under control”.

China Daily – “The report covering the week of May 26 to June 1 showed an increase of 414 cases, with the most affected states located along the northern coast and western Venezuela. The H1N1 virus first appeared in 2009 in Venezuela, infecting about 900 people and causing eight deaths. In Venezuela, test methods now are short of quickly determining whether a patient has been infected by the virus, but the country reportedly has a good reserve of medicine needed to combat the disease.”