More Animal Diseases Seen as Human Threat

by Beth Daley
Boston Globe, April 19, 2001, p.A01
(Abbreviated)

More than 200 people died last year in Yemen and Saudi Arabia - some blinded or vomiting blood - when a disease that normally afflicts African livestock somehow crossed the Red Sea and attacked humans.

In Malaysia in 1998, a virus normally found in pigs broke out among farmers, killing a third of the people it infected.

And a handful of Europeans have come home from Africa in recent years with Lassa fever, a rodent virus that kills 5,000 people a year - but seldom outside of West Africa.

While public attention remains riveted on efforts to keep foot-and-mouth and mad cow diseases out of the United States, front-line infectious disease researchers are concerned about the next wave of potentially deadly diseases. The most dangerous of these obscure conditions have made the mysterious leap from animals to infect humans, mainly in tropical climates far from the United States.

''This is what keeps us awake at night,'' said Dr. Daniel Shapiro, infectious disease specialist at Boston Medical Center. Shapiro is managing editor of ProMED-mail., an online emerging disease monitor supported by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. ''We can't make sure they don't happen here and we need to control them if they do break out. With increased globalization, there is increased risk.''

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of animal diseases that can infect and kill humans. But scientists usually discover them only when outbreaks occur in people - they can't predict what will make the jump from animal to human or where.

For example, it wasn't until pig farmers in northern Malaysia three years ago began developing fevers and other symptoms that doctors realized they were suffering from a virus contracted from pigs. (The pigs, in turn, got it from fruit bats.) More than 100 people died and hundreds of thousands of pigs were slaughtered before the Nipah virus was controlled. The US government is studying Nipah in a high-security Atlanta lab in hopes of stopping it from breaking out here.

''We are studying diseases that are highly lethal and for which there is no specific treatment,'' said Steve Ostroff, associate director for epidemiologic science at the National Center for Infectious Diseases.

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.