2011-07-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

THE DISEASE

RESURGENCY

Strains of the bubonic plague are still at large, and are as resistant to modern treatments as they were to leeches in medieval times. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, have studied a strain contracted by a 16-year-old boy in Madagascar. Although the boy survived, it was no thanks to modern medicine: the scientists tried. Moreover, they found that the strain spread readily in controlled experiments, and fear that it could be just as easily transmitted in nature.

· Most TB DNA components

have been identified

Tuberculosis (TB) kills more people than any other infectious disease, claming about three million lives worldwide each year. Its increasing resistance to antibiotics, allied with a growing pool of TB-prone HIV sufferers means that this figure is set to rise. However, a team of scientists at the Sanger Center near Cambridge, UK, have identified most of the genes which make up TB DNA, and sequenced its four million components.

OUTBREAKS

· Chicken flu is virulent

but also relatively weak

The first recorded case of H5N1, the virus known as chicken flu, was identified in Hong Kong in 1997, following the death of a young boy. Potentially lethal, chicken flu attacks the respiratory system and other organs, and is as yet incurable. Yet, despite its virulence, the virus has relatively weak powers of transmission, although human-to-human transmission has not been ruled out. Swift identification prevented the Hong Kong outbreak from claiming more lives, but a cure still remains elusive.

· Australia prepares for the

arrival of a deadly disease

Australia is preparing for the arrival of one of the world’s most deadly diseases. Japanese encephalitis is spread by mosquitoes, infecting about 15,000 people each year and leaving many permanently brain damaged or paralyzed. Since it was identified in Japan in the 1930s, the disease has spread through Southeast Asia, as far as Bali. From Bali, it spread to Papua New Guinea, predicted to hit Australia by the millennium. The disease is rife among herds of feral pigs, which act as amplifiers However, a human vaccine is now available.

DISCOVERIES

· Malaria is public health

enemy number one

The World Health Organization has recently labeled malaria, Public Health Enemy Number One. Each year, it infects between 300 and 500 million people and kills up to 2.7 million of them. What is more to the drugs currently depended upon to treat it .So great is the need for new anti-malarial medicines, that researchers from around the world have now begun to map the genome of the causative organism, Plasmodium falciparum. Efforts to build a co-ordinate global strategy for malaria control, spearheaded by The National Institutes of Health and France’s Institute Pasteur, now involve several major international bodies.

· Enzyme marker that can

turn immune cells on and off

Researchers at the Toronto Hospital, Toronto, Canada, and the Canadian Red Cross have discovered a new marker for the HIV virus. The marker is an enzyme which turns immune cells on and off.

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