»emerging diseases«

Associate Press writer Angela Stoll reports in Spiegel online (26.3.2006) about strategies against the MRSA bug, a bacteria of type Staphylococcus aureus that is resistant to a broad range of antibiotics. Prevalence in Europe is quite different. The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries were quite successful to combat the occurrence of these bugs in hospitals while risks are higher in the UK. In the Netherlands doctors developed a "search and destroy" strategy: patients are screened for the bug and isolated for a treatment. Now a joint project of Dutch and German medical staff from hospitals, public health departments, nursing homes and general practitioners is aimed at bringing best-practice methods also to German patients.

Iain Hollingshead compare in the Guardian (25.2.2006) the hysteria with bird flu with the recent SARS outbreak (for your relief: SARS has been contained by 2003). Medically, Sars is now "one of the best studied of any emerging infective disease", according to Kathryn Holmes of Colorado University, writes Hollingshead. "While it would now take an unfortunate accident or a fresh mutation for the Sars virus to re-emerge, scientists would be well prepared to contain it if it did."

David Kind (the British science adviser to the government) and colleagues report in Science magazine (8.9.2006) the outcome on a so called foresight study on infectious diseases. Foresight studies use a bunch of scientific methods to make an educated guess about the future -- mostly covering the next 10 to 25 years. And regarding infectious diseases -- remember BSE, SARS and the like -- there's more to come, reckon the experts at least. Eight overlapping classes are numbered (1) new diseases eg. SARS, BSE and human influenza like H5N1, (2) infections with a developing resistance against standard treatments like tuberculosis and MRSA, (3) zoonoses, ie. infections coming from animals, including SARS, influenza, Lyme disease, (4) the big three tropical diseases HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, malaria, (5) epidemic plant diseases, (6) acute respiratory infections, (7) sexually transmitted infections, including but not limited to HIV, (8) animal diseases. Four important technology systems are considered for flexible detections.

The hotspots for the risks that new infectious diseases emerge are located in India, China, tropical Africa and Central America, states a report in the journal Nature and a related Nature News story (20.2.2008) by Michael Hopkin. But also the western part of Germany, NL, BE, and the UK are at risk, according to deep red spots on the map. High population density is a main risk factor, explains Kate Jones of the Zoological Society of London. In the supplementary information of the paper there's a list of all 335 new infections diseases emerged since 1940, and a lot came first on the stage in western Europe.