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Health officials estimate the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 killed 50 million people worldwide -- more than died in World War I. Now President Bush is concerned that a strain of avian flu that has killed millions of birds in Asia could mutate and cross over to humans. "I am concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world," Bush said during an Oct. 4 news conference. "I have thought through the scenarios of what an avian flu outbreak could mean." The Department of Defense is preparing in case the worst happens. DoD...

PARIS, Oct. 13 (Xinhuanet) -- A mysterious disease hit waterfowl in west Iran, leaving thousands of dead birds, the cause is still unknown, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said here on Thursday. "A high mortality has been observed among wild waterfowl in Poldasht (in West Azerbaijan province)" said the Paris-based organization on its website. It noted that there was no pathological agent identified nor particular lesion appeared at the autopsy and that weakness and death are only signs of this affection. The OIE said a total of 3,673 wild waterfowl had died since thephenomenon was found on Oct....

A cargo plane carrying small amounts of flu virus crashed on railway tracks near Winnipeg's city center Thursday, killing the pilot but missing buildings and vehicles, authorities said. The research samples of frozen influenza and herpes viruses were destroyed in the crash and ensuing fire along with other freight, Federal Express spokeswoman Karen Cooper said. She said the Cessna 208 was owned by Morningstar Air Express of Edmonton and was under contract to FedEx. Morningstar spokesman Don Boettcher didn't immediately identify the woman piloting the aircraft. "She'd been with us for about five years," he said, without providing further details....

Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using techniques of molecular biology to synthesize it, and then using it to infect mice and human lung cells in a specially equipped, secure...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Small amounts of a bacteria that causes "rabbit fever" were found on Washington's National Mall last weekend as thousands of protesters marched against the Iraq War, U.S. health authorities said on Saturday. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said several government environmental air monitors in the Mall area detected low levels of Francisella tularensis bacteria that cause Tularemia, commonly known as rabbit fever, on September 24-25.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Avian flu will mutate and become transmissible by humans and the world has no time to lose to stop it becoming a pandemic, the head of the U.N. World Health Organization said on Thursday. Lee Jong-wook, a South Korean doctor, delivered his stark warning as the United States worked to rally states behind a new U.S. plan to fight the disease, which has already killed more than 60 people in Asia and spread to Russia and Europe. "Human influenza is coming, we know that, and no government, no leaders can afford to be caught off-guard," Lee...

Disease hunters in action, just outside Washington, DC, at the U.S. Defense Department's Global Emerging Infections System, known as GEIS. They are working to track, prevent and cure infectious diseases. In one laboratory doctors are working with Sand Flies, which carry Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that usually infects the skin, but can also infect internal organs. Scientists also are working with mosquitoes that carry malaria. Chemists are working on new treatments and vaccines for a number of communicable diseases. Captain Joseph Malone Captain Joseph Malone is the director of GEIS. "We play a supportive role in both outbreaks within the...

KIEV, Ukraine - (KRT) - The United States and Ukraine signed a joint agreement here Monday designed to stem the threat of bioterrorism by placing modern safeguards on deadly pathogens and other material dating from a Soviet-era biological weapons program that now could be vulnerable to theft. "The agreement has a benefit for the citizens of both countries," said Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has been working several years to achieve the U.S.-Ukraine accord. As Lugar and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., met with Ukrainian leaders and participated in a signing ceremony for the...

— Diseases like smallpox, the avian flu and hemorrhagic fever seem like distant threats to many Americans. But what if one of these diseases, either by terrorist or unwitting traveler, crossed the border into the Rio Grande Valley? Organizers of a new bioterrorism and emergency preparedness program want to make sure Valley health professionals are thoroughly prepared for such a possibility. The University of Texas Health Science Center’s School of Public Health in Houston, along with other universities, now is offering training sessions on bioterrorism and disaster preparedness throughout the region. UT’s School of Public Health in Brownsville and Texas...

WASHINGTON - The two-year-old Homeland Security Department is undergoing a massive overhaul to centralize its analyses of terrorism intelligence and place higher priority on bioterrorism. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was resetting top priorities in a bid to spur a sluggish bureaucracy beset by turf wars and growing pains. Creation of an intelligence director to centralize terrorism analyses and a chief medical officer to focus on bioterrorism are among top changes to be announced by Chertoff on Wednesday. These are two areas where experts believe the department has lagged. Chertoff ordered a review in March, shortly after he took office,...

The Chronicle for Higher Education is reporting that the National Academy of Sciences has published a paper on how terrorists could kill tens of thousands of people by dropping a few grams of botulinum toxin into a milk truck or storage silo. The Academy published the paper over protests by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The paper, authored by two Stanford University researchers, was scheduled to have been published in the academy's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a month ago but the academy had held the paper because of the concerns leveled by HHS. The...

With some 574 people hospitalized with hepatitis A in the Tver region and an initial influx of some 45 new patients each day, regional investigators are looking into a possibility that the outbreak - which began over a week ago and has been blamed on an infection in the water supply - may be linked to a biological attack. The outbreak began in the last days of May in the town of Rzhev, and with hundreds of people getting sick, local authorities were suspecting everything from the tap water to bottling factories. Early on, the initial culprit was Rzhevpivo, a...

Posting note: Gleaned from shaky translation of a Russian press report.Reliability ? Thursday, June 09, 2005 Russians Investigating Possible Bio-Attack Investigators are checking whether the mass outbreak of hepatitis A in the Tver region near Moscow could be linked to the bio-weapons sector. At the moment 363 people are in hospital, and some newspapers have linked the outbreak to the recent murder of Russia’s leading specialist in bio weapons. The outbreak began at the end of May in the Tver region and has now reached the neighboring region of Smolensk, agencies report. It was initially blamed on a local soft...

Original title: Hepatitis A epidemic in Russia's center likely caused by terrorist act 06/09/2005 10:56 The virus was most likely discharged in the water, which a local brewing enterprise used in the production Hepatitis A epidemic is gathering steam in the Tver region of Russia, spreading to other regions of Russia's center. Eleven residents have been hospitalized with hepatitis in the neighboring Smolensk region. 352 people in total, including 75 children, have been infected with hepatitis A as of 9 a.m. of June 9th. Investigators say that the infection sprang from the Rzhev-based brewing company Rzhevpivo (the Tver region), which...

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...

Toronto — The military's intelligence arm has warned the federal government that avian influenza could be used as a weapon of bioterrorism, a heavily censored report suggests. It also reveals that military planners believe a naturally occurring flu pandemic may be imminent. The report, entitled Recent Human Outbreaks of Avian Influenza and Potential Biological Warfare Implications, was obtained under the Access to Information Act by The Canadian Press. It was prepared by the J2 Directorate of Strategic Intelligence, a secretive branch of National Defence charged with producing intelligence for the government. The report outlines in broad terms the methods that...

Ten Stanford University faculty members, including a Nobel Prize winner, have signed a letter with 700 other scientists nationally protesting a federal policy that prioritizes bio-terrorism research over public-health issues. The letter was sent to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni on Monday, Feb. 28. “The diversion of research funds from projects of high public-health importance to projects of high biodefense but low public-health importance represents a misdirection of NIH priorities and a crisis for NIH-supported microbial research,” the letter states. Stanford scientists who signed the letter include Arthur Kornberg, a Nobel Prize winner, and Charles Yanofsky, who...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 - More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack. The scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners and a biologist who is to receive the National Medal of Science from President Bush in March, say grants for research on the bacteria that cause anthrax and five other...

Newswise ? In a finding that represents an entirely new approach to treating viral diseases such as smallpox, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and collaborating institutions have shown that infections can be stymied by interfering with signals used by viruses to reproduce in human cells. The results, reported in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, point to a possible strategy for broadly treating acute viral infections that affect millions of people worldwide. If the technique leads to a drug capable of treating people infected with the smallpox virus, it could eliminate the virus? potential as a bioterror...

Cancer drugs have unexpectedly led to an entirely new way to beat viral infections - and particularly smallpox - a new study suggests. Viruses are hard to stop and, with few exceptions, drugs aimed at killing viral infections have not worked nearly as well as the antibiotics that kill bacteria. Now, US scientists have found that an experimental drug aimed at stopping the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells actually prevents the smallpox virus from replicating inside human cells, and can save mice from dying of a closely related virus, Vaccinia. Viruses succeed by invading a cell and hijacking the "machinery"...