Thread: Tropical diseases updates

GSK helpin' out WHO...

WHO Outlines Strategy to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases
14 October 2010 - The international pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline announced October 14 that it will donate 400 million more tablets for the treatment of intestinal worms in children. This comes as the World Health Organization is calling on drug companies to donate more medicine to help to eradicate tropical diseases. The WHO says in a new report that one billion people in the world's poorest countries are chronically ill from tropical diseases that receive little attention from drug manufacturers and health organizations.

The diseases - leishmanaisis, chagas, dengue and 14 others - are unknown to many people in developed countries, or are thought to have been eradicated long ago. But the World Health Organization says they cause massive, hidden suffering that keeps millions of people in poverty. And the WHO is calling on governments, donors and pharmaceutical companies to help reduce those numbers significantly. Dr. Peter Hotez is an expert in tropical diseases. He says that these parasitic diseases are rampant even though they are easily treatable.

"The neglected tropical disease program of USAID, which is also funded through global health initiatives, in some cases can lead to the elimination of some very important neglected tropical diseases such as lymphatic filariasis, possibly river blindness and leprosy," he said. Dr. Hotez says that these diseases can often be treated with a single pill. But there is often is no funding for proven and inexpensive treatments.

"Out of 10 billion [dollars] spent annually, only 65 million, less than one percent, is spent on neglected tropical diseases. We have to begin bringing that up because these conditions are just as important and we can do something about them through mass drug administration." The WHO reports that the global effort against Guinea worm has yielded remarkable results - a 99 percent decline in the disease. People in affected villages use screens to keep Guinea worm eggs out of their drinking water and out of their bodies.

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Eradicating guinea worm...

Will Carter finally defeat guinea worm?
Saturday, Dec 25, 2010 - The former president has waged war against the disease for more than two decades. The last battle is in the Sudan

Lily pads and purple flowers dot one corner of the watering hole. Bright green algae covers another. Two women collect water in plastic jugs while a cattle herder bathes nearby. Samuel Makoy is not interested in the bucolic scenery, though. He has an epidemic to quash. Makoy points out to the women the fingernail-length worm-like creatures whose tails flick back and forth. Then a pond-side health lesson begins on a spaghetti-like worm that has haunted humans for centuries.

This fight against the guinea worm is a battle former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has waged for more than two decades in some of the poorest countries on earth. It is a battle he's almost won. In the 1950s the 3-foot-long guinea worm ravaged the bodies of an estimated 50 million people, forcing victims through months of pain while the worm exited through a swollen blister on the leg, making it impossible for them to tend to cows or harvest crops. By 1986, the number dropped to 3.5 million. Last year only 3,190 cases were reported.

Today the worm is even closer to being wiped out. Fewer than 1,700 cases have been found this year in only four countries -- Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan, where more than 95 percent of the cases are. The worm's near-eradication is thanks in large part to the efforts of Carter and his foundation. "I'm still determined to outlive the last guinea worm," Carter told The Associated Press in a phone interview. The 86-year-old set that goal in the 1980s, when his center helped eliminate guinea worm from Pakistan and other Asian nations.

The Carter Center has battled the worm for 24 years through education and the distribution of strainers that purify drinking water. It has helped erase guinea worm in more than 20 countries, and it believes the worm will follow smallpox -- which was wiped out in the late 1970s -- as the next disease to be eradicated from the human population. But Carter staff members say ending the disease in Southern Sudan may prove the most difficult, because of how remote the remaining endemic areas are and the fact that the worm is found in semi-nomadic pastoralists who have little education and low sanitation standards.

More http://www.salon.com/life/2010/12/25...orm/index.html

483 Dead Of Cholera In Papua New Guinea...

PNG cholera death toll nearly 500
February 16, 2011 - NEARLY 500 people have died from Papua New Guinea's prolonged cholera outbreak, a top PNG medical official says.

Health Secretary Doctor Clement Malau has told PNG's National newspaper 483 people have died while 10,066 have been diagnosed with cholera since the first outbreak in September 2009. Seven of PNG's 19 provinces, including the capital Port Moresby, have been affected by cholera with Dr Malau adding Western Province was the worst hit with 300 deaths. "I am urging the provinces to sustain the response momentum and widen surveillance and awareness activities," he said. "I appeal again to local authorities at the district and provincial levels to respond effectively to the cholera outbreaks in their areas".

In December last year, there were grave concerns that cholera would spread across the Torres Strait into Australia when it was detected in Western Province and on its island centre of Daru. Travel between Australia's Torres Strait Islands and neighbouring PNG communities was restricted, with hundreds turned away in an effort to contain the potentially deadly outbreak. In relief efforts to contain the various outbreaks, the World Health Organisation (WHO), along with Australian aid agency AusAID, flew medical supplies and offered experts for logistics to contain the spread.

But it was an initial poor response and lack of funding by the PNG government that has been blamed for cholera spreading throughout the country. Australia provided $1.7 million in assistance including supplies of intravenous fluids, oral salts and water purification tablets, as well as emergency experts being flown to outbreak centres. Cholera usually makes people only mildly sick, but up to 10 per cent of patients develop a severe illness. It is transmitted by water contaminated by bacteria from an infected person or food contaminated by dirty water, soiled hands or flies.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news...#ixzz1EAR8CpkE

I live in Mexico and dengue is a terrifying illness especially for parents of small children. But, they thank the wonderful people of the U.S. every single night for banning DDT.

What do you think would happen is dengue, malaria, and the other mosquito-borne fevers suddenly appeared in the U.S. and Europe? Can you spell DDT?

Granny tol' Uncle Ferd he can't go armagiller huntin' with his friends no more

Eating armadillos blamed for leprosy in the South
4/27/2011 - Disease likely spreads when people handle, eat the animals, which carry bacteria for disfiguring disease

With some genetic sleuthing, scientists have fingered a likely culprit in the spread of leprosy in the southern United States: the nine-banded armadillo. DNA tests show a match in the leprosy strain between some patients and these prehistoric-looking critters — a connection scientists had suspected but until now couldn't pin down. "Now we have the link," said James Krahenbuhl, who heads a government leprosy program that led the new study.

Only about 150 leprosy cases occur each year in the U.S., mostly among travelers to places like India, Brazil and Angola where it's more common. The risk of getting leprosy from an armadillo is low because most people who get exposed don't get sick with the ancient scourge, known medically as Hansen's disease and now easily treatable. Armadillos are one of the very few mammals that harbor the bacteria that cause the sometimes disfiguring disease, which first shows up as an unusual lumpy skin lesion.


Nine-banded long-nosed armadillos harbor the bacteria that causes leprosy.

Researchers at the National Hansen's Disease Programs in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, led an international team of scientists who published their findings in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. They think it requires frequent handling of armadillos or eating their meat for leprosy to spread. DNA samples were taken from 33 wild armadillos in Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, where they're sometimes referred to as "hillbilly speed bumps" because they're often run over by cars.

Scientists also took skin biopsies from 50 leprosy patients being treated at a Baton Rouge clinic. Three-quarters had never had foreign exposure, but lived in Southern states where they could have been exposed to armadillos. An analysis found that samples from the patients and armadillos were genetically similar to each other and were different from leprosy strains found elsewhere in the world. The unique strain was found in 28 armadillos and 25 patients.

More http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42788111...ious_diseases/

Filtering out dengue virus from mosquitoes...

Specialized mosquitoes may fight tropical disease
Wed Aug 24,`11 – Scientists have made a promising advance for controlling dengue fever, a tropical disease spread by mosquito bites. They've rapidly replaced mosquitoes in the wild with skeeters that don't spread the dengue virus.

More than 50 million people a year get the dengue virus from being bitten by infected mosquitoes in tropical and subtropical areas, including Southeast Asia. It can cause debilitating high fever, severe headaches, and pain in the muscles and joints, and lead to a potentially fatal complication. There's no vaccine or specific treatment. Some scientists have been trying to fight dengue by limiting mosquito populations. That was the goal in releasing genetically modified mosquitoes last year at sites in Malaysia and the Cayman Islands.

Australian scientists took a different tack, they report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. First, they showed that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the chief carriers of the dengue virus, resist spreading that virus if they are infected with a particular kind of bacteria. Then they tested whether these resistant mosquitoes could displace their ordinary cousins in the wild, thus reducing the number of dengue-spreading mosquitoes.

The resistant mosquitoes have an advantage in reproduction. Resistant females can mate with either resistant or ordinary mosquitoes, and all their offspring will be resistant. But when ordinary females mate with a resistant male, none of the offspring survive. For the experiment, scientists released more than 140,000 resistant mosquitoes over 10 weeks in each of two isolated communities near Cairns in northeastern Australia, starting last January. By mid-April, monitoring found that resistant mosquitoes made up 90 percent to 100 percent of the wild population.

The result is a "groundbreaking first step," Jason Rasgon of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore wrote in a commentary accompanying the paper. Rasgon, who did not participate in the study, said the next hurdle is to test the idea in areas where dengue is spread constantly, rather than sporadically as in Australia. Researchers will also have to show it works against varied strains of the dengue virus, he said.

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Source of cholera pandemic found...

Cholera pandemic has a single global source
25 August 2011 How cholera has spread from the Bay of Bengal

A major cholera pandemic has spread in at least three waves from a single global source: the Bay of Bengal. A study in Nature reveals cholera's spread over the last 60 years into Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, continent-hopping on long-haul flights. The research by a team from Cambridge's Sanger Institute showed the infection is evolving, with the newest waves showing antibiotic resistance.

A UK expert said it was "a scandal" cholera was still affecting people. Cholera is a bacterial infection of the intestine that causes diarrhoea. It affects 3-5m people annually in 56 countries, killing between100,000 and 150,000. If untreated, it can kill within hours through dehydration. It is easily treated by drinking clean water, but without this, severe cases have a 30-50% mortality rate.

'Only explanation'

In this study, the researchers sequenced the genome of 154 samples collected from patients around the world. Genome sequencing technologies have been getting better, faster and cheaper. Until recently, sequencing would be carried out on just four or five bacteria samples. Similarities between cholera genomes showed how the various strains are related, while subtle differences showed how it is evolving. By investigating these bacteria at the genetic level, the authors were able to piece together the story of the latest, and ongoing, global cholera pandemic. "We were surprised to see that the pattern we see is very clear. All of the samples were related. There is a single global source of cholera in the Bay of Bengal," said co-author Dr Nick Thomson of the Sanger Institute.

It is not yet clear why the Bay of Bengal is at the centre of the pandemic, though cholera bacteria exist naturally within some marine ecosystems. The local ecology, climate, and the presence of large river deltas are likely to be key factors in its presence there. The results show several cases of cholera suddenly jumping between continents, suggesting that it was spread by passengers on long-haul flights. "I think that's the only possible explanation. Our data show that this has happened, for example from Angola to South America. "Many people can have cholera with no symptoms, so they transmit it without realising," added Dr Thomson.

'One fell swoop'

Preventing ebola...

Critical Protein Discovery Could Help Prevent Lethal Ebola Virus
August 25, 2011 - An international team of scientists has discovered a biochemical route used by the deadly Ebola virus to infect human cells.

Scientists say the discovery points the way to new drugs that could prevent or treat one of the world’s most lethal viral diseases. The Ebola hemorrhagic virus, which got its name from the central African river near where the disease first emerged in 1976, kills an estimated 90 percent of the people and non-human primates it infects.

The disease causes very high fever, both internal and external bleeding, and has led to thousands of deaths in many sub-Saharan African countries, including Gabon, Sudan, the Ivory Coast and Uganda, since the first reported outbreak 35 years ago. Although considered a rare disease, Ebola causes panic whenever there is an outbreak, in part because little is known about where the illness comes from or how it spreads.

Experts believe infected bats may be one source of these sporadic occurrences of Ebola, and the disease is then spread from person to person through tainted body fluids or blood. To better understand the biology of Ebola, a team of researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, the Whitehead Institute at MIT and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases studied how the virus actually infects cells.

Kartik Chandran, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein, is a senior author of the study. “The critical step that we were studying is what we call viral entry," Chandran explained. "And it’s basically the step that results in the virus getting into the cytoplasm where the [genetic] goodies are for making copies of itself.” Researchers looked at normal cell proteins that the Ebola virus might be hijacking, in effect, to get inside and infect mammalian cells. Investigators focused on one protein in particular - called Neimann-Pick C1 or NPC1.

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There is no cure or vaccine for guinea worm...

Fresh push to rid the world of guinea worm by 2015
5 October 2011 - The UK government is backing a new campaign to try to rid the world of guinea worm by 2015.

There were almost 2,000 cases of the debilitating parasitic disease in Africa last year. The push to eradicate guinea worm has been led by The Carter Center - set up by the former US president, Jimmy Carter - since 1986. The Department for International Development (DfID) is ready to donate £20m to the drive.

It's thought this will fill about a third of the funding gap. Ministers are now calling for other donors to make significant contributions. Although it doesn't usually kill, guinea worm causes agonising pain and leaves some sufferers bed-ridden after they contract it by drinking contaminated water. Months after drinking the water, a metre-long spaghetti-like worm emerges from the patient's body through a blister in the skin.

Perpetual cycle

The worm ejects many thousands of larvae if it comes into contact with water - perpetuating a cycle of disease. There is no cure or vaccine, so the UK aid money will be used by the Carter Center to help train people in tracking outbreaks and using cloths to filter drinking water. Last year, there were 1,797 cases of guinea worm in South Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali and Chad. Nigeria, Niger and Ghana have succeeded in recent efforts to wipe out the disease. When the Carter Center began its work on guinea worm 25 years ago, there were about 3.5m cases in 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

Mr Carter said: "Guinea worm has horrendous consequences for sufferers in terms of their immediate health, and their education and employment. "It prevents people from escaping poverty. "I welcome the challenge laid down by the British government. I call on other donors to match their efforts." If the campaign succeeds, it will be the first time a disease has been wiped out through education - rather than the use of a vaccine or medicine. The international development minister, Stephen O'Brien, said: "President Carter's commitment has brought guinea worm to the brink of eradication. "It has never been a question of if we can rid the world of this ancient disease - but when."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15182237

New malaria vaccine works!...

Study shows first-ever malaria vaccine cuts risk of disease in half
Oct 18, 2011 - The results of a large-scale study of the first-ever malaria vaccine cuts the risk of the disease in half and could save millions of lives of small children.

The analysis was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The Guardian newspaper says the trial, which involved almost 15,500 babies, shows that the vaccine could potentially save 800,000 lives a year. It is being carried out in seven countries – Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania.

The vaccine has been in development for two decades – the brainchild of scientists at the British drug company GlaxoSmithKline, which has promised to sell it at no more than a fraction over cost-price, the newspaper says. Andrew Witty, GSK's CEO, tells the newspaper that some of the scientists who began working on a vaccine 25 years ago broke down in tears when the trial data were revealed.

"It was the emotion of what they had achieved -- the first vaccine against a parasitic form of infection," says Witty. "They were overwhelmed. It says something about the amount of heart that has gone into this project." The Guardian reports that the World Health Organization has said that if the results of the study were satisfactory, it would issue a recommendation for its use as early as 2015. WHO says any such vaccine should be part of a program that includes the use of bed netting and insecticide spraying.

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