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ENTEBBE Two more deaths were confirmed Wednesday in Ugandas ongoing Ebola outbreak, raising the total to 16. Officials are fighting to prevent further transmission of the virus. Through a partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the country is uniquely positioned to respond quickly to suspected cases of Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses.

Representatives from the World Health Organization say 36 possible Ebola cases have been reported in Uganda, mostly in the west of the country. At least one death occurred in Kampala, raising concerns that the virus had reached the capital. However, there is no evidence of any transmission within the city.

Virus hunters

Ebola is no stranger to Uganda. Last year a 12-year-old girl living an hour outside of Kampala died from the virus. Thirty-nine people died in a 2007 outbreak in an area bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But unlike other countries in the region that have seen similar outbreaks, Uganda has a team of virus hunters from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on hand to respond quickly to hemorrhagic fevers, like Ebola.

The CDC has been working with Ugandas Virus Research Institute in Entebbe for more than a decade. Dr. Trevor Shoemaker, a CDC epidemiologist, says they formalized the relationship two years ago by developing a fully functioning laboratory on the institutes campus to rapidly diagnose possible cases of Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses.

"In previous outbreaks theres been a long period of time between the first initial suspect case presenting to the hospital and then the initial diagnosis of it either being a hemorrhagic fever. So this laboratory was set up to narrow that amount of time, to close that gap," he explains.

Related - Ugandas Latest Ebola Virus Outbreak Spotlights Poorly-Understood Killer

CDC involvement

Shoemaker says the CDC chose to work in Uganda because of the regions history of hemorrhagic virus outbreaks. While there are different risks at different times of the year, Uganda and much of the region have many of the necessary factors, including the animal population, necessary for an outbreak.

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Uganda, US CDC Cooperate on Ebola

More than a dozen people are reported dead in western Uganda this week after being infected with the Ebola virus, a highly contagious and often fatal pathogen that has struck this region of Africa several times in the past 12 years. International medical workers are on the scene trying to contain the outbreak.

The latest outbreak in Uganda is being caused by the so-called Sudan strain of Ebola, one of five varieties of a virus that, officials say, typically kills between 50 and 90 percent of its victims.

Related video report by Vidushi Sinha

Tarik Jasarevic is a spokesman for the World Health Organization or WHO. Although the pathogen is extremely aggressive and easily transmitted, Jasarevic says it can be contained by testing people suspected of being infected with Ebola virus, placing the sick in quarantine and seeking out those with whom they may have had contact.

It is because to stop the transmission chain, that we need to find those people and make sure that they are not infected in the near term and, if they are, they are treated in an appropriate way, Jasarevic said.

Related - Uganda, US CDC Cooperate on Ebola WHO and health care workers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are helping Ugandan officials determine the scope of the outbreak, tend to the sick and communicate with members of the public about how to protect themselves from infection.

Ebola's average incubation period is between two and 12 days. Symptoms include a sudden onset of fever, extreme weakness and muscle aches. Vomiting and diarrhea may occur and, in rare case of so-called Ebola hemorrhagic fever, patients suffer from internal and external bleeding.

Currently, there is no cure for Ebola, nor are there any specific treatments. Patients who have been sickened but not killed by the virus usually need intensive rehydration therapy during their recovery. But researchers are homing in on a vaccine. U.S. government scientists have developed an experimental vaccine that protects monkeys against the two most lethal Ebola strains.

And scientists at Fort Dietrick, Maryland, have also reported progress on a possible cure that targets Ebola's genetic material and prevents the viral cells from reproducing. After a week of injections, four rhesus monkeys infected with Ebola were cured of their infection. The experimental treatment has yet to be tested and approved for use in humans.

First identified in 1976, the Ebola virus has appeared most often in tropical Africa. While the precise source of Ebola is not known, Jasarevic says health experts suspect that wild bats transmit the virus to other forest animals such as monkeys and antelope, which are frequently killed for meat.

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Uganda Ebola Outbreak Spotlights Poorly-Understood Killer

At least 15 people have died in Uganda from the deadly Ebola virus with the toll likely to rise further, the health ministry said Wednesday.

Ebola broke out in early July in Uganda's western Kibale district, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) from Kampala, and around 50 kilometres from the border with Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Two more deaths were last evening recorded at Kagadi Government Hospital in Kibale district... The first death was a female who had earlier tested positive for Ebola," said Dennis Lwamafa, Uganda's director general for health services.

The other death, a "new admission", was feared to have also been due to Ebola, although tests had yet to confirm the exact cause, Lwamafa said in statement.

A health worker from western Uganda last week fell sick and travelled to Kampala, later dying in hospital. It was the first time the killer virus, one of the most virulent diseases in the world, had hit the city of 1.5 million.

A sample has also been collected from a patient in Mbarara, another district of western Uganda, some 100 kilometres from Kibale -- and it is currently being analysed.

In Kibale, health workers are monitoring "two confirmed cases of Ebola and 16 unconfirmed admitted at the hospital isolation facility," Lwamafa said.

In addition, 178 people remain under surveillance in the district, he added.

Ebola, which can cause both internal and external bleeding, spreads by direct contact with the blood or other body fluids of infected persons, according to the World Health Organisation.

The rare haemorrhagic disease, named after a small river in DR Congo, killed 37 people in western Uganda in 2007 and at least 170 in the north of the country in 2000.

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Ebola deaths in Uganda rise to 15

Thursday, August 2, 2012

A FIVE-year-old boy from Tublay, Benguet, was tested positive for Enterovirus-71, the same killer virus that killed several children in Cambodia last month.

This is the second case of E-71 or hand, foot, and mouth disease monitored in the country after swab samples from the boy tested positive in laboratory testing at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine.

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Department of Health-Cordillera Dr. Amelita Pangilinan said the infected boy is now recuperating at home, indicating that the countrys EV-71 is mild and not fatal unlike in Cambodia where close to 60 children have died since June.

Pangilinan said the case of the boy is non-neurologic exhibiting only on and off fever, cough, and cold and exhibiting pustules in the hand, mouth and feet.

The boy was already discharged from the Benguet General Hospital where he was admitted for days.

A surveillance team was also sent by the DOH to monitor the brother of the boy as well as other children whom he had close contact but tests results came out negative. (JM Agreda)

Published in the Sun.Star Baguio newspaper on August 02, 2012.

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Boy, 5, tests positive for deadly virus

Virulent New Flu Subtype Killed New England Seals

July 31, 2012 -- A new and virulent subtype of flu bug has emerged among harbor seals in New England, researchers report.

Over a four-month period beginning last September, 162 harbor seals were found dead or dying along the coast of New England. An investigation by renowned virus hunter W. Ian Lipkin, MD, of Columbia University, identified the killer: a mutant flu bug transmitted to the seals by sea birds.

Virus isolated from the seals had undergone a series of important mutations:

"An additional concern is the potential [animal-to-human] threat that this virus poses, as it has already acquired mutations ... that are often, though not exclusively, regarded as prerequisites for pandemic spread," Lipkin and colleagues note in an article published in mBio, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The basic type of flu virus isolated from the seals has long been known to science. It's called H3N8. An H3N8 virus that caused flu in horses entered the U.S. in the early 1960s. The canine H3N8 that in 2004 caused a flu outbreak among racing greyhounds apparently came from the horse H3N8. It now spreads easily among dogs.

The good news is that neither the equine H3N8 nor the canine H3N8 flu bugs infect humans. It's unlikely the seal H3N8 virus will spread directly to humans, either.

But Lipkin and colleagues suggest that seals, like pigs, may be able to harbor bird and mammal flu viruses at the same time. The deadly H5N1 bird flu is carried by sea birds. The worry is that mammal-adapted H3N8 will combine with H5N1, and a deadly virus will emerge.

That's only a remote possibility. Yet it's clear that H3N8 viruses already have learned to spread from birds to horses, dogs, and now to seals. And in a controversial experiment with ferrets, researchers have shown that H5N1 bird flu is capable of mutating into a form that spreads among mammals.

The warning from Lipkin carries weight among scientists. Lipkin directs Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity. He's also director of the World Health Organization's center on emerging diseases, and is co-chair of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee for the CDC.

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Seal Flu: Next Pandemic Threat?