TB INFECTION

TB-infected workers left to fend for themselves

By IRIN
First Published: January 4, 2010

Amr Emam/IRIN Mohamed Mustafa, a father of six and former cement factory worker, has lung cancer, psoriasis and TB Amr Emam/IRIN "Tuberculosis patients shouldn’t be given that treatment. Employers shouldn’t take the fruit and throw out the peel like this," says Mohamed Al-Asmaie, head of Friends of the Environment about automatic dismissal.

CAIRO: For years, Mohamed Mustafa inhaled the soft dust that used to come out of the machines in the cement factory south of Cairo where he worked, but he never thought those small particles would end his career.
A few years ago, the 55-year-old former cement worker developed a chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever and night sweats, and he began losing weight. When a doctor told him he had tuberculosis (TB), he said he collapsed in shock with the realization that he would lose his job, just as many of his former colleagues had when they had been found to have TB.
“Cement dust used to fall on my head in showers every minute,” Mustafa said. “I never expected it to bring about my end,” he told IRIN.
The Egyptian government says 21 in every 1,000 Egyptians are infected with TB every year. But only about one in 10 of these latent cases become active. It estimates the number of patients nationwide to be 17,000, but independent organizations say the number is far higher.
“TB has come to pose a real danger to the people of this country,” said Essam Al-Moghazy, chief of the National Tuberculosis Control Program, a state-run agency seeking to assist TB patients. “The problem is that poor Egyptians living in the country’s slums are more prone to it.”
Having TB, an infectious and sometimes deadly disease that is passed from person to person through the air, is cause for automatic dismissal in many companies in Egypt.
Mohamed Al-Asmaie, head of Friends of the Environment, a local NGO campaigning on behalf of TB patients, said when many Egyptian workers become sick with TB, instead of receiving treatment in hospitals, they are laid off and have to fend for themselves.
“Tuberculosis patients shouldn’t be given that treatment,” said Al-Asmaie. “Employers shouldn’t take the fruit and throw out the peel like this.”
Mustafa, who lives in the industrial city of Helwan, about 30km south of Cairo’s centre, blames the years of cement dust inhalation for weakening his immune system enough to get infected by TB.
No hard scientific evidence
Though there is no hard scientific evidence linking cement dust to TB, studies have shown that persons with silicosis — an occupational lung disease caused by inhalation of crystalline silica dust — are up to 30 times more likely to develop TB.
TB is the third most life-threatening disease in Egypt, after bilharzia and hepatitis C, according to the Health Ministry.
Despite this, in its 2009 Global Report, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Egypt had succeeded in achieving the global target in TB case detection and treatment success in 2007.
The case detection rate of positive cases in Egypt was 72 percent (global target is 70 percent) and the treatment success rate was 87 percent (global target is 85 percent), WHO said in its report.
Health officials in Egypt hope to eradicate TB by 2050.
But such statistics mean nothing to TB patients like Mustafa. The father of six, who lives on a pension of LE 76 ($14) a month, has already developed lung cancer and psoriasis, like many of his colleagues from the factory who were infected with TB.
Adding to his burden is that he has infected his wife and one of his six children.
“Most of the drugs my doctors give me are ineffective,” Mustafa said. “Everybody keeps avoiding me and my wife for fear of catching TB.” –IRIN
SOURCE:http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/

SWINE FLU VIRUS 'COULD STILL MUTATES'

Swine flu virus 'could still mutate' WHO warns

Dr Margaret Chan says avian flu is more of a problem than swine flu

The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned the global swine flu pandemic is not yet over and the virus could still mutate.

Dr Margaret Chan said it was important to "guard against complacency" despite signs the disease had peaked in North America and parts of Europe.
She said the virus was still active in countries including India and Egypt.
More than 11,500 people are believed to have died in more than 200 countries and territories because of swine flu.
However Dr Chan said it would take at least two years before a true death toll could be established.
The WHO's director general said the US, Canada and the UK were among those countries where the worst of the swine flu outbreak had appeared to have passed.
Danger
But she added: "It is too premature and too early for us to say we have come to an end of the pandemic influenza worldwide."
She said experts needed to continue monitoring the pandemic for another six to 12 months as it could mutate into a more dangerous strain.
"We will watch this virus with eagle's eyes," she said.

SWINE FLU SYMPTOMS 1. High temperature, tiredness and lowered immunity 2. Headache, runny nose and sneezing 3. Sore throat 4. Shortness of breath 5. Loss of appetite, vomiting and diarrhoea 6. Aching muscles, limb and joint pain Source: NHS Fergus on Flu Q&A: Advice about swine flu

Dr Chan said it was fortunate the pandemic had been milder than expected.
"The fact that the long overdue influenza pandemic is so moderate in its impact is probably the best health news in a decade," she said.
Millions of people are believed to have recovered after contracting the virus and displaying few symptoms.
She said the demand for swine flu vaccinations in some European countries had been lower than expected and WHO was investigating whether superfluous vaccines could be sent to developing countries.
Dr Chan said drug makers and countries promised to donate nearly 190 million vaccine doses to WHO, with the first doses of the donated vaccines to be distributed in Azerbaijan, Mongolia and Afghanistan next month.
However she admitted she had not yet had a vaccine but said she would have it soon.
She said that although countries are now better prepared to cope with a global disease outbreak, people still had to be aware of the dangers of bird flu (H5N1).
She said this was more toxic and deadly than swine flu and that many countries remained ill-prepared for mass outbreaks of this virus.
"The world is not ready for a pandemic to be caused by H5N1," she said.


SOURCE:http://news.bbc.co.uk/

NEW FORM OF MALARIA

New form of malaria threatens Thai-Cambodia border

By MARGIE MASON and MARTHA MENDOZA - Associated Press Writers

PAILIN, Cambodia -- O'treng village doesn't look like the epicenter of anything.

Just off a muddy rutted-out road, it is nothing more than a handful of Khmer-style bamboo huts perched crookedly on stilts, tucked among a tangle of cornfields once littered with deadly land mines.
Yet this spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless. This time, scientists have confirmed the first signs of resistance to the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for malaria: Artemisinin.
If this drug stops working, there's no good replacement to combat a disease that kills 1 million annually. As a result, earlier this year international medical leaders declared resistant malaria here a health emergency.

"This is not business as usual. It's something really special and it needs a real concerted effort," said Dr. Nick White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok who has spent decades trying to eradicate the disease from Southeast Asia. "We know that children have been dying in Africa - millions of children have died over the past three decades - and a lot of those deaths have been attributed to drug resistance. And we know that the drug resistance came from the same place."
Malaria is just one of the leading killer infectious diseases battling back in a new and more deadly form, the AP found in a six-month look at the soaring rates of drug resistance worldwide. After decades of the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph have started to mutate. The result: The drugs are slowly dying.
Already, The Associated Press found, resistance to malaria has spread faster and wider than previously documented. Dr. White said virtually every case of malaria he sees in western Cambodia is now resistant to drugs. And in the Pailin area, patients given artemisinin take twice as long as those elsewhere to be clear of the parasite - 84 hours instead of the typical 48, and sometimes even 96.
Mosquitoes spread this resistant malaria quickly from shack to shack, village to village - and eventually, country to country.
And so O'treng, with its 45 poor families, naked kids, skinny dogs and boiling pots of rice, finds itself at the epicenter of an increasingly desperate worldwide effort to stop a dangerous new version of an old disease.

Bundled in a threadbare batik sarong, 51-year-old Chhien Rern, one of O'treng's sick residents, sweats and shivers as a 103-degree fever rages against the malaria parasites in her bloodstream.
Three days ago Chhien Rern started feeling ill while looking for work in a neighboring district. So she did what most rural Cambodians do: She walked to a little shop and asked for malaria medicine. With no prescription, she was handed a packet of pills - she's unsure what they were.
"After I took the drugs, I felt better for a while," she says. "Then I got sick again."
The headaches, chills and fever, classic symptoms of malaria, worsened. Chhien Rern's daughter persuaded her to take a motorbike taxi past washed out bridges and flooded culverts to the nearest hospital in Pailin, a dirty border town about 10 miles from O'treng.............
READ MORE:http://www.thestate.com/sportswire/story/1087143.html

MALARIA ON MOUNT KENYA

Global warming blamed for rise in malaria on Mount Kenya The Times 2009-12-30

Global warming has caused a seven-fold increase in cases of malaria on the slopes of Mount Kenya, a British-funded research team has found. A 2C increase in average temperatures around the mountain in the past 20 years has allowed the disease to creep into higher altitude areas, where the local population of four million has little or no immunity. The researchers, funded by the Department for International Development (DfID), found that the average temperature in the Kenyan Central...



SOURCE:
http://www.theworldpress.com/

SWINE FLU

Children more likely to catch swine flu, study suggests

Children have been hard hit by the swine flu virus

Children are twice as likely as adults to catch swine flu, according to a joint UK-US study.

Imperial College London researchers and a team from the US looked at how the virus spread among families.
In a study of more than 800 people, one in eight people developed the infection after someone in their house got it.
But the team also dismissed suggestions that children may be "super spreaders" as they were found to be no more contagious than older people.
Rates of swine flu have tended to be higher among younger age groups, the official figures have shown.

If they are only likely to transmit the virus to other people for the first few days of their illness, keeping people off work for a week may be unnecessary and could be detrimental to the economy Dr Simon Cauchemez, lead researcher

What is more, there is thought to be a large pool of children who have been infected but not displayed symptoms.
This research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, confirmed that children were more likely to become infected.
The team looked at the families and household contacts of 216 people infected with swine flu.
Of that group of 600, the under-18s were most likely to get it - twice as likely as adults under 50 - while those over the age of 50 were the least likely.
Infectious
However, the overall one in eight figure for infections was deemed to be pretty low compared to past pandemics.
The researchers, who were also drawn from the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at how long people remained infectious as well.
They found the average length of time between one person displaying symptoms and then someone else in their house falling ill was 2.6 days.
They said it meant suggestions at the start of the pandemic that people should stay at home for up to seven days when ill was probably unnecessary.
Lead researcher Dr Simon Cauchemez said: "If they are only likely to transmit the virus to other people for the first few days of their illness, keeping people off work for a week may be unnecessary and could be detrimental to the economy."
A Department of Health spokesman said: "All further information continues to add to our knowledge and understanding of the virus."

SOURCE:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/