Polio's last stand? 2012 cases
Nigeria - 97
Pakistan - 47
Afghanistan - 26
Chad - 5
Source: IMB
Attacks in the Peshawar region killed a female vaccination supervisor and her driver, as well as a student volunteer.
Coming after five deaths on Tuesday, the UN said it was suspending its three-day vaccination drive.
No group has claimed responsibility, but the Taliban have issued threats against the UN's anti-polio campaign.
Pakistan is one of just three countries where the disease is still endemic.
The UN children's agency Unicef and the World Health Organisation were suspending work on the programme nationwide after Wednesday's bloodshed, said Unicef spokesman Michael Coleman.
The programme was halted in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces on Tuesday after four female health workers were shot dead in the city, while another female worker was killed in an attack in Peshawar.
Nationwide drive
The vaccination supervisor and her driver died when their car was sprayed by gunmen riding motorbikes in Charsadda district, north of Peshawar, police said.
The student volunteer was shot in the head when gunmen on two motorbikes fired at a team of vaccinators in a northern suburb of Peshawar.
Gunmen riding motorbikes also shot at polio vaccinators in another area of Charsadda and in the adjoining district of Nowshera, although no injuries were reported.
Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf on Tuesday condemned the attacks and praised the work of the polio vaccination teams, calling on regional authorities to guarantee their safety.
Wednesday is the final day of a three-day nationwide anti-polio drive - during which an estimated 5.2 million polio drops were to be administered.
There has been opposition to such immunisation drives in parts of Pakistan, particularly after a fake CIA hepatitis vaccination campaign helped to locate Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
Militants have kidnapped and killed foreign NGO workers in the past in an attempt to halt the immunisation drives, which they say are part of efforts to spy on them.
Afghanistan and Nigeria are the only other countries where polio is still endemic.
Pakistan is considered the key battleground in the global fight against the disease, which attacks the nervous system and can cause permanent paralysis within hours of infection.
Showing posts with label Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Who. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Saturday, June 30, 2012
mutant bird flu research
The US journal Science published research Thursday on how a mutant bird flu may spread among mammals and possibly humans, following months of controversy over the risks of bioterrorism.
The paper detailed how a Dutch lab engineered an H5N1 bird flu virus that can be transmitted in the air among ferrets, and followed the publication last month of findings by a US-based team that made similar advances.
Last year, a US biosecurity panel called for only heavily edited results of the two papers to be released, for fear that an ill-intentioned scientist might be able to use the data to unleash a potent and lethal form of bird flu that humans could catch easily.
But international experts have since agreed that the benefits of publishing outweighed the risks.
Deadly flu pandemics have killed millions of people in the past. Until now, there have been fewer than 600 human cases of H5N1 bird flu infection in the world since it first infected people in Hong Kong in 1997, but more than half of all cases have been fatal.
The World Health Organization has tallied 606 human cases of bird flu since 2003 and 357 deaths, according to its latest report issued this month.
Lead researcher Ron Fouchier, a scientist at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, said the aim was to gain a better understanding of how avian flu is spread in order to prepare for a potential human outbreak.
"The virus did not kill the ferrets that were infected via the aerosol route," said Fouchier, who has frequently stressed that the dangers of his research were overblown in the media.
"Anybody with access to the scientific literature can read all about dangerous pathogens that are more interesting to terrorize the world with than our particular virus."
Instead, Fouchier and his colleagues showed that the H5N1 virus could become airborne among ferrets -- considered a reasonable but not perfect model for humans -- after as few as five mutations and without mixing H5N1 with another flu virus.
The previous paper by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin and colleagues, published in May in the British journal Nature, described how the virus could become airborne after a series of mutations and re-assortments with the 2009 H1N1 virus, or "swine flu."
The two papers offer important insights into what forms a spreadable bird flu may take, and could lead to more advances in how to stop it, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"I believe that the benefits are greater than the risks. Does that mean there's no risk? No, of course not," he said.
"Being in the free and open literature would make it much easier to get a lot of the good guys involved than the risk of getting the rare bad guy involved."
But it remains unclear just how much risk people face, according to Derek Smith from the University of Cambridge, who co-authored an article in the same edition of Science on the potential for such a virus to evolve in humans.
Smith said his team's research determined that viruses with two of the mutations are already being found in birds.
To reach the minimum level of five mutations that Fouchier's team described looks "pretty difficult, but we don't yet know how difficult it is," he said.
"We now know we are living on a fault line. What we have discovered in this working collaboration with Drs Fouchier and Kawaoka is that it is an active fault line," he told reporters.
Asked if such a virus would inevitably evolve in nature, Smith likened that to asking, "Could it ever snow in the Sahara?"
"It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that they could evolve in a human host or some other mammalian host. We see nothing -- we see no fundamental hurdle to that happening," he added.
In the meantime, Fauci said a voluntary moratorium on research that involves the causes or transmissibility of H5N1 has yet to be lifted, as leading US health officials try to establish rules for future experiments that could raise alarm among biosecurity experts.
"We are still struggling a bit," said Fauci.
"I can't tell you when it's going to be voluntarily lifted, but we are working very hard right now (to establish a) broad general criteria of the kinds of experiments that could be done."
The editor-in-chief of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the eight-month-long controversy "has shone a spotlight on the need to deal more effectively with 'dual-use research of concern.'"
The paper detailed how a Dutch lab engineered an H5N1 bird flu virus that can be transmitted in the air among ferrets, and followed the publication last month of findings by a US-based team that made similar advances.
Last year, a US biosecurity panel called for only heavily edited results of the two papers to be released, for fear that an ill-intentioned scientist might be able to use the data to unleash a potent and lethal form of bird flu that humans could catch easily.
But international experts have since agreed that the benefits of publishing outweighed the risks.
Deadly flu pandemics have killed millions of people in the past. Until now, there have been fewer than 600 human cases of H5N1 bird flu infection in the world since it first infected people in Hong Kong in 1997, but more than half of all cases have been fatal.
The World Health Organization has tallied 606 human cases of bird flu since 2003 and 357 deaths, according to its latest report issued this month.
Lead researcher Ron Fouchier, a scientist at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, said the aim was to gain a better understanding of how avian flu is spread in order to prepare for a potential human outbreak.
"The virus did not kill the ferrets that were infected via the aerosol route," said Fouchier, who has frequently stressed that the dangers of his research were overblown in the media.
"Anybody with access to the scientific literature can read all about dangerous pathogens that are more interesting to terrorize the world with than our particular virus."
Instead, Fouchier and his colleagues showed that the H5N1 virus could become airborne among ferrets -- considered a reasonable but not perfect model for humans -- after as few as five mutations and without mixing H5N1 with another flu virus.
The previous paper by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin and colleagues, published in May in the British journal Nature, described how the virus could become airborne after a series of mutations and re-assortments with the 2009 H1N1 virus, or "swine flu."
The two papers offer important insights into what forms a spreadable bird flu may take, and could lead to more advances in how to stop it, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"I believe that the benefits are greater than the risks. Does that mean there's no risk? No, of course not," he said.
"Being in the free and open literature would make it much easier to get a lot of the good guys involved than the risk of getting the rare bad guy involved."
But it remains unclear just how much risk people face, according to Derek Smith from the University of Cambridge, who co-authored an article in the same edition of Science on the potential for such a virus to evolve in humans.
Smith said his team's research determined that viruses with two of the mutations are already being found in birds.
To reach the minimum level of five mutations that Fouchier's team described looks "pretty difficult, but we don't yet know how difficult it is," he said.
"We now know we are living on a fault line. What we have discovered in this working collaboration with Drs Fouchier and Kawaoka is that it is an active fault line," he told reporters.
Asked if such a virus would inevitably evolve in nature, Smith likened that to asking, "Could it ever snow in the Sahara?"
"It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that they could evolve in a human host or some other mammalian host. We see nothing -- we see no fundamental hurdle to that happening," he added.
In the meantime, Fauci said a voluntary moratorium on research that involves the causes or transmissibility of H5N1 has yet to be lifted, as leading US health officials try to establish rules for future experiments that could raise alarm among biosecurity experts.
"We are still struggling a bit," said Fauci.
"I can't tell you when it's going to be voluntarily lifted, but we are working very hard right now (to establish a) broad general criteria of the kinds of experiments that could be done."
The editor-in-chief of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the eight-month-long controversy "has shone a spotlight on the need to deal more effectively with 'dual-use research of concern.'"
Friday, February 17, 2012
H5N1
17 February 2012 –
A group of public health experts announced today that they have agreed to delay the publication of new research on the H5N1 influenza virus after a meeting convened by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
It had been looking at how the work could be released while guarding against its abuse by bioterrorists.
“Given the high death rate associated with this virus – 60 per cent of all humans who have been infected have died – all participants at the meeting emphasized the high level of concern with this flu virus in the scientific community and the need to understand it better with additional research,” said Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s Assistant Director-General of Health Security and Environment.
WHO convened the meeting to facilitate the discussion of differing opinions that have arisen in recent months after two research groups, one in the Netherlands and the other based in the United States, have created versions of the H5N1 influenza virus which are more transmissible in mammals than the H5N1 virus that occurs naturally.
“The results of this new research have made it clear that H5N1 viruses have the potential to transmit more easily between people underscoring the critical importance for continued surveillance and research with this virus,” Mr. Fukuda said.
During the talks, the group of experts came to a consensus that delaying publication of the entire manuscripts of research would have more public health benefit than urgently publishing it in part.
The experts also agreed that further research on the virus is necessary to protect public health and to review the biosafety and biosecurity implications of the laboratory-modified virus.
“There is a preference from a public health perspective for full disclosure of the information in these two studies. However, there are significant public concerns surrounding this research that should first be addressed,” Mr. Fukuda said.
In a news release, WHO said that it will continue the discussion with relevant experts to move the issue forward.
A group of public health experts announced today that they have agreed to delay the publication of new research on the H5N1 influenza virus after a meeting convened by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).
It had been looking at how the work could be released while guarding against its abuse by bioterrorists.
“Given the high death rate associated with this virus – 60 per cent of all humans who have been infected have died – all participants at the meeting emphasized the high level of concern with this flu virus in the scientific community and the need to understand it better with additional research,” said Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s Assistant Director-General of Health Security and Environment.
WHO convened the meeting to facilitate the discussion of differing opinions that have arisen in recent months after two research groups, one in the Netherlands and the other based in the United States, have created versions of the H5N1 influenza virus which are more transmissible in mammals than the H5N1 virus that occurs naturally.
“The results of this new research have made it clear that H5N1 viruses have the potential to transmit more easily between people underscoring the critical importance for continued surveillance and research with this virus,” Mr. Fukuda said.
During the talks, the group of experts came to a consensus that delaying publication of the entire manuscripts of research would have more public health benefit than urgently publishing it in part.
The experts also agreed that further research on the virus is necessary to protect public health and to review the biosafety and biosecurity implications of the laboratory-modified virus.
“There is a preference from a public health perspective for full disclosure of the information in these two studies. However, there are significant public concerns surrounding this research that should first be addressed,” Mr. Fukuda said.
In a news release, WHO said that it will continue the discussion with relevant experts to move the issue forward.
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