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WASHINGTON, Aug 05, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- It is a small world after all -- horrifyingly small, if you think about it in a certain way.
Consider: the threat of a global flu pandemic that could kill multi-millions if just one avian flu virus mutates in just one human in rural Thailand and then hops a plane; the fear that an infected cow from one country gets eaten by people in another who come down, en masse, with a gruesome brain-killing disease; the fact that soldiers from the war on terror are returning with bugs that are hard to stop and could easily spread.
Those are a few of the concerns raised by the week's headlines, but before pushing the gloom-and-doom button, it is worth noting a lot of people -- and one well-fed machine -- are working to keep the worst from happening.
The machine is a computer, which chewed on an incredible amount of data and disgorged a scenario for preventing an avian flu pandemic -- but only if the people who implement it do everything right.
The findings, reported online by the journal Nature, come from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Los Angeles, where scientists created the computer model to find what steps are likeliest to prevent a worldwide outbreak.
"To be effective, you really must use a combination of strategies. No single one would successfully prevent an epidemic," said Neil Ferguson, an international research scholar at the institute.
The simulation showed that any hope of preventing the disease from spreading worldwide would depend on three factors: recognizing quickly that a human-to-human form of the virus had appeared; isolating infected patients by shutting schools and workplaces, and treating the 20,000 people closest to the outbreak with anti-viral drugs.
On the gruesome-brain-disease front, a third cow suspected of mad cow disease tested negative, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said. Two cows have so far tested positive, one a Canadian-born cow in Washington state in 2003, the other a Texas cow in June.
"Needless to say, we are very pleased with these results," said John Clifford, the Agriculture Department's chief veterinarian. "Our enhanced surveillance program is designed to provide information about the level of prevalence of BSE (mad cow disease) in the United States, which by any measure is extremely low."
The "enhanced surveillance" comes after UPI Medical Reporter Steve Mitchell -- and subsequently the agency's own inspector general -- uncovered extensive flaws in programs set up by federal agencies to detect and prevent mad cow.
On the home front, wounded U.S. troops are suffering from an unusually high rate of infection with a drug-resistant bacteria, Forbes.com reported.
"Most of the victims are relatively young troops who were injured by the land mines, mortars and suicide bombs that have permeated the Iraq conflict," wrote Forbes' Matthew Herper.
Military hospitals are taking extra precautions to prevent the spread of the bacteria, called acinetobacter baumannii. Three drugs have shown success against the bacteria, but it is proving remarkably resilient and hardy and can easily infect other patients.
Final notes: University of Michigan researchers took a step toward creating artificial enamel that could be used to fill human teeth. ... Postmenopausal women with early breast cancer do better when they switch from Tamoxifen to another drug after two years of treatment, a new study by German and Austrian researchers found.
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E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com
Copyright 2005 by United Press International.
