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A mummified child in Korea whose organs were relatively well preserved has produced the oldest full viral genome description. A liver biopsy of the mummy revealed a unique hepatitis B virus (HBV) known as a genotype C2 sequence, which is said to be common in Southeast Asia. The first discovery of hepatitis in a Korean mummy came in 2007. The new work provided more detailed analysis... Carbon 14 tests of the clothing of the mummy suggests that the boy lived around the 16th century during the Korean Joseon Dynasty. The viral DNA sequences recovered from the liver biopsy enabled the...

The liver of a child mummy preserved for 500 years still holds samples of the hepatitis B virus... Mark Spigelman of the Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem... is a paleo-epidemiologist, who studies ancient diseases found on mummified bodies to shed light on the modern forms of such illnesses. This is the first time hepatitis B has been spotted in a mummified body. In South Korea, 12 percent of the population are hepatitis carriers, more than double the world average. The virus, responsible for about 1 million deaths each year,...

A combination of avian flu and foot and mouth disease risk destroying the protein supply, eroding public trust, and further destabilizing the Arab world's most populous country. Lost in the recent political jockeying and protest violence leading up to Egypt's May 23 presidential elections is the unfolding public health disaster there. Avian flu and foot and mouth disease are running rampant, killing people and livestock as well as inflating the price of food. It's a serious health and economic issue, but it has potentially much larger implications for Egypt, and this little-discussed crisis is beginning to resemble those that occur...

This Ancient, Deadly Disease Is Still Killing In Europe John Donnelly, GlobalPost Dec. 30, 2011, 12:53 PM GENEVA, Switzerland – On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization’s headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world. Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) – the highest rate in the world ever recorded for...

Scientists used the degraded strands to reconstruct the entire genetic code of the deadly bacterium. It is the first time experts have succeeded in drafting the genome of an ancient pathogen, or disease-causing agent. The researchers found that a specific strain of the plague bug Yersinia pestis caused the pandemic that killed 100 million Europeans - between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the total population - in just five years between 1347 and 1351. They also learned that the strain is the "mother" of all modern bubonic plague bacteria. "Every outbreak across the globe today stems from...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have cracked the genetic code of the Black Death, one of history's worst plagues, and found that its modern day bacterial descendants haven't changed much over 600 years. Luckily, we have. > In devastating the population, it changed the human immune system, basically wiping out people who couldn't deal with the disease and leaving the stronger to survive, said study co-author Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Ontario. >

WHAT: Secondary infections with bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia, were a major cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic and may be important in modern pandemics as well, according to a new article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases co-authored by David M. Morens, M.D., senior advisor to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers examined 13 studies published between 1918 and 1920. During this time, many scientists erroneously believed that influenza was caused by bacteria, not a virus. As a result, researchers...

Last week, on the very day that the World Health Organisation officially declared the swine flu pandemic over, microbiologists launched a new alert – over multi-drug resistant bacteria. Professor Tim Walsh, co-author of a report in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, strikes the now-familiar note of impending doom: ‘In many ways, this is it. This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing Enterobacteriaceae.’ (1) Here we go again. Only 12 months since the great summer alarum of 2009, when England’s chief medical officer Liam Donaldson raised the spectre of 65,000 deaths...

IGNORE the fuss over the news last week — the United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency admits to overestimating the global epidemic by six million people. That was a sampling error, an epidemiologist’s Dewey Defeats Truman. Look instead at the fact that glares out from the Orwellian but necessary revision of the figures for earlier years. There it is, starkly: AIDS has peaked. New infections reached a high point in the late 1990’s — by the best estimate, in 1998. There must have been such moments in the past — perhaps A.D. 543, when Constantinople realized it would survive the Plague of...

BAGHDAD, Sept. 11 — A cholera epidemic in northern Iraq has infected approximately 7,000 people and could reach Baghdad within weeks as the disease spreads through the country’s decrepit and unsanitary water system, Iraqi health officials said Tuesday. The World Health Organization reported that the epidemic is concentrated in the northern regions of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya and that 10 people are known to have died. But Dr. Said Hakki, president of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, a relief organization that has responded to the epidemic, said that new cases had turned up in the neighboring provinces, Erbil and Nineveh, indicating...

RIYADH (Reuters) - Hundreds of camels have died in Saudi Arabia this week from a mystery ailment. The Agriculture Ministry has said 232 camels died in the space of four days in the Dawasir Valley, 400 km (250 miles) south of Riyadh. King Abdullah has promised compensation for owners, who say the real number of deaths is far higher. Agriculture ministry officials have denied an infectious disease caused the deaths and blamed them on animal feed supplied by food storage authorities.

TODAY the special “vaccine court” at the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington will begin hearing Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, the first case of about 4,800 similar ones to examine whether childhood vaccinations can cause autism. We have no wish to comment on these legal issues. But having spent years researching the prevalence of autism in American children, we are concerned that publicity surrounding the case will only drag out debate about whether past trends indicate we face an autism “epidemic.” The claims for or against an autism epidemic simply cannot be proved given...

For centuries, rats and fleas have been fingered as the culprits responsible for the Black Death, the medieval plague that killed as many as two thirds of Europe’s population. But historians studying 14th-century court records from Dorset believe they may have uncovered evidence that exonerates them. The parchment records, contained in a recently-discovered archive, reveal that an estimated 50 per cent of the 2,000 people living in Gillingham died within four months of the Black Death reaching the town in October 1348. The deaths are recorded in land transfers lodged with the manorial court which – unusually for the period...

Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her. Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained...

Antiviral coating may help fight epidemics 15:00 14 April 2006 From New Scientist Print Edition BANKNOTES, vending machines and photocopiers could help fight off future epidemics if a novel antiviral coating can be made to work safely. Materials researcher Guagang Ren at Queen Mary, University of London, has discovered a raft of metal, metal oxide and ceramic nanoparticles that have strong antiviral properties. He hopes to create a face mask impregnated with the particles to destroy certain airborne viruses before people breathe them in. Ren has joined forces with UK-based Qinetiq Nanomaterials and London research firm Retroscreen Virology. Qinetiq's technology...

AUSTIN, April 6, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Ebola, a form of hemorrhagic fever in which the internal organs of the victim liquefy, has one of the highest rates of fatality of any known contagious disease at approximately 80-90% and is one of the most contagious diseases known to medical science. It is also high on the list of possible bio-terror weapons of concern to international law enforcement and military security agencies. Tom Clancy’s thriller novel, Rainbow Six describes a group of radical environmentalists that wants to rid the world of people using a modified version of Ebola.All of which is...

TO the pantheon of social arbiters who came up with the firm handshake, the formal bow and the air kiss, get ready to add a new fashion god: the World Health Organization, chief advocate of the "elbow bump." If the avian flu goes pandemic while Tamiflu and vaccines are still in short supply, experts say, the only protection most Americans will have is "social distancing," which is the new politically correct way of saying "quarantine." But distancing also encompasses less drastic measures, like wearing face masks, staying out of elevators — and the bump. Such stratagems, those experts say, will...

<p>Since it was discovered in 1976, the Ebola virus has killed more than 1,200 people in scattered outbreaks in Central Africa, the World Health Organization calculates. But while health workers have managed to contain the outbreaks, scientists have been frustrated that they do not know the virus's hiding place in nature.</p>

...After nearly a decade of research, teams of scientists said yesterday that they had re-created the historic influenza virus that by some estimates killed 50 million people world-wide in 1918 and 1919. The scientists concluded that the virus originated as an avian bug and then adapted and spread in humans by undergoing much simpler changes than many experts had previously thought were needed for a pandemic. Some mutations of the 1918 virus have been detected in the current avian-flu virus, suggesting the bug "might be going down a similar path that led to 1918,".... The studies, published yesterday in the...

According to CNN....going to be more where that came from

BOSTON, June 1 - A federal initiative as ambitious as the Manhattan Project is needed to protect the nation from infectious diseases, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said Wednesday in a lecture at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Frist, who studied medicine at Harvard, said the effort would defend against both bioterrorism and diseases that are spread naturally. He said that the United States and the rest of the world were unprepared for a potential pandemic despite signs that emerging viruses like the avian flu are capable of causing sharp losses of life. "Any number of known and...

Business Day, 25 May 2005   SA’s population grew by more than 4-million people between 1996 and 2001, Statistics SA revealed in a book launched at Parliament yesterday. Entitled Achieving a better life for all, the 202-page book provides a statistical portrait of the country. It shows the country’s population grew from 40583573 in 1996 to 44819778 in 2001. KwaZulu-Natal (with 9426017) remained the most populated province, followed closely by Gauteng (with 8837178 people). Zulu was the most widely spoken home language and grew 1,9% between 1996 and 2001. The next most widely spoken language was Xhosa, which dropped 0,3%....

Bird flu epidemic could kill as many as 750,000 in Britain: estimate LONDON (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of people may die and one quarter of the work force could be absent if Britain were hit by a bird flu pandemic, a senior government official said. "It may be somewhere between 20,000 and 750,000 extra deaths and it may be 25 percent of the population off work," the government official, speaking on a non-attributable basis, told a conference in London. "That is the shape of the event we are going to have to deal with," he said. Britain's population is...

Authorities brace for Avian FluNorway's Directorate for Health and Social Affairs has recommended that stores of influenza medicine be increased as a precaution against a possible pandemic.The World Health Organization (WHO) assesses the Avian Flu outbreak in Southeast Asia as a potential forerunner of a global influenza epidemic due to its high fatality rate and the danger of it mutating to a form even more dangerous to humans.Norway's health authorities said Wednesday that stocks of influenza remedy Tamiflu be increased from 200,000 ten-pill cures to 1.4 million.Authorities also suggested the purchase of 12 million daily doses of the medication amantadine,...

HA NOI — Heightened awareness has proved a decisive factor in the initial success against the recent bird flu outbreak, reportedly waning in Viet Nam, reported authorities. The Animal Health Department of the Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development said nine out of 35 affected provinces and cities have been disease free for over 21 days. Compared to the previous outbreak, the number of affected zones and culled poultry sharply decreased this time around. Last year, officials killed 37.5 million birds, whereas this year the number only reached 1.5 million. Bui Quang Anh, director of the department, said the lower...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations has warned of epidemics within days unless health systems in south and southeast Asia can cope after some 12,000 people were killed and tens of thousands left homeless by giant tsunami waves. Aid agencies round the world rushed staff, equipment and money to southern Asia after the tsunamis, triggered by a massive underwater earthquake, pummelled coastal communities in at least six countries on Sunday. "This may be the worst national disaster in recent history because it is affecting so many heavily populated coastal areas ... so many vulnerable communities," the U.N.'s Emergency Relief Coordinator...

Plague affects around 1,000 people each year The Black Death, which killed 23m people in the middle ages, could be lying dormant and could strike again, say researchers. Their claim is based on the theory that the pandemic was triggered not by bubonic plague but by another virus. The theory is outlined in a new book by Professor Christopher Duncan and Dr Susan Scott of Liverpool University. "We believe this virus is merely lying in wait, ready to strike again," said Professor Duncan. The Black Death is thought to have caused the deaths of up to 200m people worldwide over...

They broke the mold with Michael Savage, and a number of records. The New York Times No. 1 best-selling author is extraordinary in just about every category you can think of. He’s the holder of two master’s degrees and a doctorate, an accomplished scientist, author times 19, TV personality, talk radio phenom and patriot. Savage is one of the most controversial hosts in the nation, and his sky-high ratings and national following testify to this. Savage is also one of the brainiest guys around, but he inevitably bowls you over with his common sense. He has that uncanny ability to...

In a world that is getting smaller and more crowded, where people -- and animals -- can travel around the globe in a matter of hours, experts say outbreaks of diseases like monkeypox, SARS and West Nile virus will continue to increase. "This is part of a new normal of emerging infectious diseases," said CDC Director Julie Gerberding. "This is a global community" and the recent outbreaks "illustrate the tendency for a problem in one corner of the world to emerge as a problem in another corner of the world." Monkeypox, which first appeared in the Western Hemisphere last month,...

A horrific venereal disease is preying on baboons in eastern Africa. An estimated 200 animals have been infected and scientists are scrambling to identify the mystery microbe that is attacking them.

Ring around the rosy. Bubonic plague creates reddish welts on the neck. Pocket full of posies. Medieval people thought putting flowers in their clothes staved off death. Ashes, ashes. Houses of the dead sometimes were torched. We all fall down. Entire families perished. Some historians believe the common children's rhyme may have been an attempt by children to cope with the long-ago horrors that swept Europe from about 1300 to about 1600. In the first five years that the plague ravaged Europe, it killed at least 25 million people. Millions more succumbed in the pandemic's later waves - dwarfing today's...

There has been intensive covert research in many countries, in an attempt to produce modifications in disease-producing viruses. Russia and Iraq have been at the forefront of these researches. There have emerged several major threats to mankind in the form of lethal viruses and bacteria. Among these are smallpox (variola), hemorrhagic viruses such as Ebola, and the encephalitis viruses. Ebola is extremely susceptible to sunlight, heat and drying. It is difficult to handle and deliver while still viable and infectious. Nonetheless, it is highly lethal and effective in large enclosed spaces such as auditoriums (?) and, probably, stadiums. Most of...