Child Viral Death Toll Up to 34 In China - 25,000 Infections
May 9, 2008
The death toll from a viral illness that is striking children across China has risen by four to 34, while the number of reported infections jumped to nearly 25,000, state media reported Friday.
Two of the latest deaths occurred in the hardest-hit central province of Anhui, where 22 children have already died of hand, foot and mouth disease, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The other two deaths were reported in the southern province of Guangdong and in neighboring Guangxi, the agency said.
In Guangdong, an 8-month-old girl died of the disease early Monday. She tested positive for enterovirus 71, which can cause a severe form of hand, foot and mouth disease, a common childhood ailment that typically causes little more than a fever and rash, Xinhua said. The disease is unrelated to the foot and mouth disease that affects livestock.
An 18-month-old boy died after falling into a coma in Guangxi, the agency said.
As of late Thursday, the number of reported cases of the disease jumped to 24,932, up from 19,962 a day earlier, Xinhua said.
Health experts have said they expect the number of reported infections to rise as a result of an order issued this week by the Ministry of Health requiring health care providers to report infections within 24 hours. The disease is expected to peak in the hot months of June and July.
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Fear Grips China As Some 12,000 Children Infected With HFMD Virus
May 6, 2008
The number of young children in China suffering from symptoms of the potentially fatal hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is nearing 12,000 with 26 deaths, national media said on Tuesday.
The virus first appeared in March when young children were admitted to hospitals in Fuyung, in the central Chinese province of Anhui, suffering from fever, rashes, blisters and mouth ulcers. Nearly 6,000 children have been infected and 22 have died in the region.
The virus has since spread to other regions with a further three deaths and 1,692 cases reported in the southern Guangdong province some 1,000 kms (1,600 miles) away from the original source of infection.
The Xinhua news agency said health authorities in east China’s Zhejiang province reported that a five-year-old boy died April 6 and that 1,198 children had been infected this year.
All the infected children are under the age of six, but the bulk of them are younger than two.
Enterovirus 71 and Coxsackievirus (Cox A 16), major causative agents for HFMD, are blamed for the epidemic. Though the death rate from the enterovirus itself is quite low, it can cause a number of severe complications depending on the age of the patient, such as polio and meningitis.
Beijing, China’s capital and the most populous city, has reported 1,482 cases of HFMD, 818 were reported in kindergartens.
Laboratory tests have confirmed that EV71 was responsible for 25 of the 26 deaths reported.
The disease is expected to reach its peak in June and July, shortly before the Beijing Olympics starts in August.
Measles Making A Comeback In Several States
May 3, 2008
Measles outbreaks in several states have led to more than 70 cases so far this year, the worst in six years, health officials said Thursday.
Most of the cases have been traced to outbreaks overseas and are mainly in children who were not vaccinated for religious or other reasons or were too young, according to the Centers for Disease control and Prevention. Since measles vaccinations began in the early 1960s, cases have dramatically declined in the U.S.
So far this year, the CDC has confirmed reports of 64 cases in nine states. There were no deaths, but 14 people were hospitalized, said CDC spokesman Curtis Allen.
That count doesn’t include Washington state, where eight cases were reported this week. Those cases stemmed from an international church conference in suburban Seattle in March, according to the state health department.
Measles is caused by a virus that normally grows in cells that line the back of the throat and line the lungs. It spreads through contact with a sneezing, coughing, infected person.
Symptoms include rash, high fever, cough, runny nose, and red, watery eyes. But about 1 in 5 measles sufferers experience more severe illness that can include diarrhea, ear infections, pneumonia, encephalitis and even seizures and death.
As Australia Dries, A Global Shortage of Rice
April 17, 2008
Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australias rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.
Ten thousand miles separate the mills hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.
The collapse of Australias rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the worlds largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice — from sheepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of wine grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at the expense of rice.
Food Shortages Herald New Era Of Hunger As More Countries Suffer Riots Over Rising Prices And Shortages Of Staples
April 14, 2008
A third day of riots in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, had by Friday paralyzed the city with looting and violence.
The toll includes a U.N. soldier who has been shot and killed in the capital while delivering food to his unit.
U.N. Mission spokeswoman Sophie Boutaud de la Combe said the soldier was shot Saturday afternoon and that he was a member of a 1,000-strong unit that deals with riots.
She said U.N. troops did not exchange fire, but had no further details.
The demonstrations began earlier in the week, in protest against rising food prices, and turned into riots.
The looting has made access to food even more difficult, doing little to ease widespread hunger among Haitians.
Port-au-Prince hospitals were filled with people injured in the riots, being treated by volunteers from the organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).
Wagner Pierre, who works for Medecins Sans Frontieres, said many of the wounds they were seeing were a result of bullets.
“In the last 4 days we have received 160 wounded, 40 of which were from gun bullet wounds,” said Wagner.
Many of the injured were bystanders caught in crossfire, like David Saint Felix, who was wounded in the leg during the protests.
“I was passing through the Haitian marine base looking for my brother who was in the protests, when I was hit with a bullet in my leg,” said Saint Felix.
The fighting across the capital was punctuated with calls for the Haitian president’s resignation.
This afternoon, a Haitian senator said that parliament has voted to dismiss Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis.
President Rene Preval announced a drop in the price of rice Saturday in a bid to defuse anger over rising food prices.
After meeting with food importers in the national palace, Preval said the price of a 50-pound bag of rice will drop from US$51 to US$43 - a reduction of 15.7 percent.
The Haitian president said the government will use international aid money to subsidize the price of rice and that the private sector has agreed to knock US$3 off the price of each bag. Preval did not say when the price reduction would go into effect.
Preval also said he would ask Venezuela for help, especially about providing fertilizer for struggling farmers.
The announcements come in the wake of looting and clashes between hundreds of protesters and U.N. peacekeepers earlier this week. Protesters blame the government for failing to create jobs and control soaring food prices and some demonstrators called for Preval’s resignation. The violence left at least five people dead.
Fungus Puts World Wheat Crop At Risk
April 1, 2008
U.N. researchers say a plant-killing wheat fungus found in western Iran is a serious threat to global food security.
Mahmoud Solh, director-general of the U.N. International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, said the Ug99 strain of wheat fungus, also known as stem rust, could soon affect farms in the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and East Asia, IRIN reported Thursday.
Richard Brettell, head of ICARDA’s Biodiversity and Integrated Gene Management Program, said the most effective way of controlling the disease is to grow resistant varieties. “The problem is that almost all the wheat varieties grown in West and South Asia are known to be susceptible to Ug99,” he told IRIN. “It will take time and coordination to replace them with resistant varieties.”
An outbreak of stem rust in North America in the 1950s destroyed up to 40 percent of the spring wheat crop.
Brazil - 80 New Cases of Dengue Fever Being Reported Every Hour
March 26, 2008
Brazil will send hundreds of health workers to Rio de Janeiro state to help overwhelmed emergency rooms that are reporting 80 new cases of dengue fever every hour, the health minister announced Monday.
In addition to the 671 health professionals, the government also will deploy 300 workers and 15 insecticide-spraying vehicles to combat the Aegis aegypti mosquito, which spreads the disease and breeds in puddles of standing water, Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao said.
Officials also opened a crisis center for officials from the state and federal governments and the armed forces to coordinate prevention efforts, although the army’s role remains undefined.
And the federal government opened three hydration tents Monday to help treat victims, who frequently suffer from dehydration. Temporao said the government would eventually open some 660 “hydration stations” around the state.
Dengue can incapacitate patients for over a week with severe headaches and joint pains, but is not usually fatal. A deadly hemorrhagic variant that causes internal and external bleeding accounts for fewer than 5 percent of cases but has shown signs of growing - often affecting people who have recovered from a less-severe form.
So far, more than 32,000 cases have been confirmed around the state, which has a population of 16 million people, and 49 people have been confirmed dead. Health specialists, however, believe the number of victims could be three times as high as reported.
There is no vaccine for dengue and treatment is usually limited analgesics, bed rest and fluids.
TB Threat Worse Than AIDS
March 24, 2008
Tuberculosis could once again cause one of the world’s deadliest epidemics because it is being ignored, a leading bioethicist says.
While one-third of the world’s population carried some sort of TB and new drug-resistant strains have recently been identified, not much has been done to stop a global epidemic, ANU bioethics expert Michael Selgelid said today.
Dr Selgelid said the development of TB medicine has been stagnant for decades while pharmaceutical companies focus on making AIDS drugs.
He said the number of people that die from TB was close to the number of AIDS-related deaths, but reported cases of the older disease have been more restricted to poorer countries.
“The pharmaceutical companies haven’t had much financial incentive to develop TB drugs,” Dr Selgelid said.
He said while many people have been involved in lobbying drug companies to develop cheaper AIDS medicines, very few had paid attention to TB.
He said new strains of the disease, including the Extensively Drug-Resistant (XDR) TB which most traditional medicines cannot cure, had been recognised in recent years.
And he said Australia could be hit with an epidemic because of it was so near to Asia, which has a high proportion of TB sufferers.
“I don’t think there has been a confirmed case of XDR TB in Australia, but I think it’s just a matter of time (before there is),” Dr Selgelid said.
“Since the 1960’s, no new TB drugs have been developed and it’s said that we shouldn’t expect any new drugs until 2015.
“Though cures have existed since the 1950s, TB is still the second leading infectious cause of mortality - a close runner up to AIDS. One-third of the world population is infected with latent TB and 10 per cent of these are expected to develop active illness at some time in their lives.”
It is believed 1.7 million people each year are killed by TB.
More Than 5 million Americans Have Alzheimer’s
March 19, 2008
An estimated 5.2 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, and it could steal the minds of one out of eight baby boomers, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Alzheimer’s Association.
The report found there were 411,000 new cases of Alzheimer’s in 2000, a number expected to grow to 454,000 new cases a year by 2010. By 2050, 959,000 people will be diagnosed with the disease every year, the report predicts.
The report, available on the Internet here, says that 14 percent of all people age 71 and over have dementia.
That includes 16 percent of women and 11 percent of men in that age group.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of cases.
One In Four U.S. Teenage Girls Has An STD Study Finds
March 12, 2008
For too many teenage girls, the numbers released Tuesday hold the threat of infertility and cancer.
For the experienced U.S. health experts who reported them, the data were alarming and disappointing.
More than one in four teenage girls in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
That translates to 3.2 million girls ages 14 to 19 who are infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes simplex virus, or trichomoniasis. Among girls with STDs, 15 percent had more than one.
The numbers came as no surprise to Daryl Lynch. As a physician in the Teen Clinic of Children’s Mercy Hospital, he deals with the children behind the statistics every day.
“We have historically seen lots and lots of STDs among teens in Kansas City,” Lynch said. “It’s a very sexually active, sexually promiscuous crowd that doesn’t practice safe sex. And therein lies the problem.”
Many adolescents have the attitude that nothing can hurt them, Lynch said.
“So motivating them to use condoms, it’s a tough sell,” he said. “Even among teens who have had an STD.”
While many of these diseases are also common among teenage boys, the researchers focused on girls because females are at higher risk of the most severe consequences of sexually transmitted diseases.
“What these numbers tell us is that we need to do a better job on lots of different fronts,” said John M. Douglas Jr., director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention. “Better education of our young people, better promotion of prevention practices and better … screening practices.”
The CDC report, issued at a conference in Chicago, is the first national look at the combined prevalence of these infections among teenage girls, lead author Sara Forhan said.
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