H5N1

Haiyan/Yolanda: Roofless in Palo

Via Inquirer.net, a personal account by Adlai Noel O. Velasco: Roofless in Palo: Lost in my hometown. Excerpt:

I usually go home to Palo at least once a year, particularly for the town fiesta on Aug. 6. The last time I was there was on May 28 to attend my mother’s death anniversary. I therefore knew the place like the back of my hand. But this time,  I found myself in unfamiliar terrain. I became lost in my own hometown. 

When I finally regained my bearings, I noticed that the Palo Public Library on the ground floor of the old Pedrosa house had been severely damaged. 

As a kid, I used to go to this library to borrow books. 

Facing the library was the cathedral where I was baptized and where I heard Mass whenever I was in Palo. The entire cathedral roof had been blown away and its dome had collapsed. 

While still in Manila, I had watched a TV footage of the cathedral’s roof being blown away. The sight was really depressing, particularly for the members of my family. 

In 2009, our family which had been designated the main sponsor of the town fiesta that year, donated P2 million to the Archdiocese of Palo to jumpstart the fund-raising drive for the renovation of the cathedral. Construction began a year later and was finally finished in 2012. 

But what took two years to renovate was destroyed in just three hours by Yolanda. 

Fr. Bernie Pantin, the town’s parish priest, is appealing to donors for help in the cathedral’s reconstruction. 

Despite the destruction, the diocese on Wednesday, held the closing ceremonies of its diamond jubilee celebrations amid heavy rain. 

Depressing sight 

Near the church was the damaged Palo campus of the University of the Philippines which used to be the Palo Puericulture Center, the town’s health clinic where I was born. 

At the end of our street is the Palo Central School, where I finished my elementary education. Its roof had been blown away. Only its walls remain standing. For me this was a really depressing sight. I have fond memories of this school which I represented in several interschool quiz contests. 

When I finally saw our house, I was relieved to see it had not been totaled, nor was it as badly damaged as I had feared. The roof of the second floor with its two bedrooms was ripped off by the howling winds but the roof over the sala, dining room and kitchen remained largely intact. 

I felt we were still lucky after I saw that the collapsed houses of our neighbors and friends. 

My niece, Carrie, showed a video she took as Yolanda pummeled the town. One could hear the ear-piercing sound of the winds which she described as similar to a jet engine preparing to take off. Outside the house, there was zero visibility. Everything appeared white. As the rains and winds battered the roof, I could hear my nephew, Jericho, praying the rosary, his voice growing louder and louder as the typhoon got stronger. They all huddled in the small corridor leading to the sala which was surrounded by solid cement walls and a narra door. 

On the night before Yolanda’s onslaught, I had called up my younger brother to warn him to prepare for the world’s strongest typhoon which was coming their way and to stay in a safe place indoors. 

But he sort of shrugged off my warning, saying the moon was bright and it was not even raining. 

The next day, I called him up again but he could no longer be contacted. 

Complete desolation 

Surveying the coastal barangays of our town, all I could see was complete desolation. Most of the fatalities came from the barangays of Baras, Candahug, Cogon, San Joaquin and Salvacion. Entire clans were wiped out by the storm surge. Joel Agner, the newly elected barangay captain of Cogon, and six family members were killed. 

More than  two weeks after the killer typhoon, the stench of rotting corpses still lingers, a sign that there are still bodies that have to be recovered. 

For residents of Palo, their horrifying ordeal was just another test of their endurance and resilience. They vowed to rise again from the catastrophe.

China: President Xi stresses fight against HIV/AIDS

Via CCTV News: President Xi stresses fight against HIV/AIDS.

Chinese President Xi Jinpinghas called for legal and scientific prevention and control of HIV/AIDS as well as various social support for carriers and patients. 

Xi made the remarks in a recent written instruction on the country's anti-HIV/AIDS work before the World AIDS Day, which falls on Dec. 1. 

According to Xi, the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS concerns people's life and health and social harmony and stability and is the obligatory responsibility of the Party and the government. 

Xi urged Party and government organs at all levels to step up the fight against HIV/AIDS. 

Xi stressed legal and scientific prevention and control work as well as the smooth implementation of support policies, calling on the public to jointly eliminate discrimination and help provide timely and effective treatment and support for HIV carriers and AIDS patients. 

Commenting on a report submitted by the Communist Party of China (CPC) Beijing Municipal Committee on its anti-HIV/AIDS work, Xi praised progress in the work and urged the city to carefully summarize experience to strive for further achievements. 

The Chinese government has intensified its fight against HIV/AIDS, with special fund allocated for the field for this year increasing by 10.5 percent from 2012. Efforts have been made to expand the coverage of HIV/AIDS check and treatment while reducing patients' burdens.

Strong earthquake hits Indonesia; no casualties

Via The Jakarta Post, a December 1 report: Strong earthquake hits Indonesia; no casualties. Excerpt:

A strong, shallow earthquake has rocked parts of eastern Indonesia. There have been no immediate reports of damage or injuries. 

The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake was centered 343 kilometers (212 miles) northwest of Saumlaki, a coastal town in Maluku province, on Sunday morning. It had a magnitude of 6.3 at a depth of about 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) beneath the sea. 

Indonesia's earthquake agency gave a magnitude of 6.7. No tsunami warning has been issued.

Containing accidental pandemics

Thanks to Lucie Lecomte for pointing me to this article in BMC Medicine: Containing the accidental laboratory escape of potential pandemic influenza viruses. The abstract:

Background 

The recent work on the modified H5N1 has stirred an intense debate on the risk associated with the accidental release from biosafety laboratory of potential pandemic pathogens. Here, we assess the risk that the accidental escape of a novel transmissible influenza strain would not be contained in the local community. 

Methods 

We develop here a detailed agent-based model that specifically considers laboratory workers and their contacts in microsimulations of the epidemic onset. We consider the following non-pharmaceutical interventions: isolation of the laboratory, laboratory workers' household quarantine, contact tracing of cases and subsequent household quarantine of identified secondary cases, and school and workplace closure both preventive and reactive. 

Results 

Model simulations suggest that there is a non-negligible probability (5% to 15%), strongly dependent on reproduction number and probability of developing clinical symptoms, that the escape event is not detected at all. 

We find that the containment depends on the timely implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions and contact tracing and it may be effective (>90% probability per event) only for pathogens with moderate transmissibility (reproductive number no larger than R0 = 1.5). Containment depends on population density and structure as well, with a probability of giving rise to a global event that is three to five times lower in rural areas. 

Conclusions 

Results suggest that controllability of escape events is not guaranteed and, given the rapid increase of biosafety laboratories worldwide, this poses a serious threat to human health. Our findings may be relevant to policy makers when designing adequate preparedness plans and may have important implications for determining the location of new biosafety laboratories worldwide.

Medical Xpress has a news story on this report.

What gay young men don't know about AIDS

On the eve of World AIDS Day, The New Yorker has an excellent short article by Michael Specter: What Young Gay Men Don’t Know About AIDS. Excerpt:

Outrage and new medicines largely overcame denial and hatred. In the years that followed, the epidemic seemed to go away—though of course it never did, here or anywhere else. (By the end of this year, AIDS will have killed nearly forty million people—most of them in Africa.) 

And this week, in a powerful story in the Times, Donald McNeil pointed out that those most wretched days could return. “Federal health officials are reporting a sharp increase in unprotected sex among gay Americans,’’ he wrote, “a development that makes it harder to fight the AIDS epidemic.” 

That is a genteel way to put it. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a bit more frank. “Unprotected anal intercourse is in a league of its own as far as risk is concerned,’’ he said. Three decades of data demonstrate the truth of that statement. If unprotected anal intercourse is rising among gay men—a trend noted not just in America but in much of the Western world—the rates of HIV infection will surely follow. 

Why is this happening? Put at least some of it down to human nature. Why do people refuse to vaccinate their children against measles or whooping cough? In many cases, because they have never seen measles and have no idea what it might do. (For perspective, more than a hundred and fifty thousand people died of measles in the developing world last year.) 

HIV is far more dangerous than measles, but also much more complicated. HIV is tied up with sex, a basic human need, but also with desire, shame, discrimination, and fear. What twenty-year-old man, enjoying his first moments of sexual adventure, is going to be scared because, ten years before he was born, people like me saw gay men writhe and vomit and die on the streets where he now stands? 

For a while, in the nineties, gay men were scared, and the statistics showed it. They used condoms regularly, and tested themselves to see if they were infected. Many still do, but others began to weary long ago of the sexual and emotional straitjacket. A drug like crystal meth (which erases inhibitions and greatly enhances sexual pleasure), while addictive and attractive, also presented an obvious and immediate drawback: it caused a condition known as “crystal dick”—no erection, no sex. Then people began to combine crystal with Viagra, and a new surge of infections began.

Haiti: 8,448 cholera deaths as of November 24

MSPP has posted new cholera statistics on its Documentation Centre page, taking us up to November 24. Now roughly 37 months into the outbreak, Haiti has reported a total of 692,197 cases, 386,713 of them serious enough for hospitalization. Total deaths are now at 8,470. All these numbers are likely to be severe undercounts.

Mexico: Tabasco state reports over 6,000 dengue cases this year

Via La Prensa: Reportan más de 6 mil casos de dengue en Tabasco.[Over 6,000 dengue cases reported in Tabasco] Excerpt, with my translation:

Tabasco sigue descendiendo en su incidencia en dengue en un 70 por ciento. A la semana 47 con corte al 25 de noviembre, se han reportado 64 casos nuevos, cuando el promedio era de hasta 200 casos nuevos por semana, así lo confirmó la Dirección General de Epidemiología (DGE) de la Secretaría de Salud federal (SSA). 

The incidence of dengue in Tabasco state continues to fall by some 70 per cent. As of November 25 in week 47, according to the General Directorate of Epidemiology of the federal Secretariat of Health, 64 new cases have been reported, when the average was up to 200 new cases weekly.

En la plataforma del Panorama Epidemiológico de Dengue, la entidad continúa ubicándose en segundo lugar en prevalencia de esta enfermedad transmitida por vector, con un acumulado de 6 mil 40 casos en lo que va del año y con el número de casos nuevos representan un incremento de 5.6 por ciento. 

On the platform of the Dengue Epidemiological Panorama, the state remains in second place in the prevalence of the disease, with a total of 6,040 cases so far this year, an increase of 5.6 per cent.

Esta semana en la entidad se reportaron 44 casos nuevos de fiebre por dengue, que hacen un acumulado de 4 mil 533, es decir 5.1 por ciento más, en tanto que de fiebre hemorrágica por dengue esta última semana se reportaron 20 nuevos casos, cuyo acumulado es de mil 507, con un aumento del 7.1 por ciento. 

This week the state reported 44 new cases of dengue fever, for a total of 4,533 (5.1 per cent more), as well as 20 new cases this week of dengue hemorrhagic fever, for a total of 1,507—an increase of 71 per cent.

En el panorama nacional, la DGE indicó que van 55 mil 632 casos de dengue y 76 defunciones a causa de esta enfermedad, de las cuales 10 han sido en Tabasco.

In the nation, the Directorate said that dengue cases now total 55,632, with 76 deaths. Of these, 10 have been in Tabasco.

Pakistan: More on the latest polio killing

Via The Express Tribune: Police official killed while providing security to polio workers in Peshawar.Excerpt:

A police official was killed and another injured when unidentified men fired at them in Peshawar, Express News reported on Saturday. 

The police officials were providing security to the Gulshan Rehman team of polio workers administering the vaccine in the area. 

Special police force official Zakir Afridi and Yaqoob were standing by the side of the road when the gunmen reportedly targeted them and drove away after firing. 

The injured official, Yaqoob, will be taken to Lady Reading Hospital for treatment. 

Gunmen frequently attack polio vaccination workers, accusing them of being Western spies and part of a plot to sterilise Muslims. 

Previous attacks  

On November 21, 11 teachers were abducted and Khyber official Niaz Ahmed Khan had said the militants who adbucted them may have mistaken them for a polio team that had just left the school after giving polio vaccinations. 

They were abducted from Khyber Agency and released on November 25. A tribal elder, speaking on condition of anonymity, had said that the militants freed the teachers on condition the government stop sending polio teams to the area.

US: Vaccination prevented 100 million cases of contagious disease

Via the Bits blog of The New York Times: The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented. Excerpt:

Vaccination programs for children have prevented more than 100 million cases of serious contagious disease in the United States since 1924, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. 

The research, led by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of public health, analyzed public health reports going back to the 19th century. The reports covered 56 diseases, but the article in the journal focused on seven: polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough. 

Researchers analyzed disease reports before and after the times when vaccines became commercially available. Put simply, the estimates for prevented cases came from the falloff in disease reports after vaccines were licensed and widely available. The researchers projected the number of cases that would have occurred had the pre-vaccination patterns continued as the nation’s population increased. 

The journal article is one example of the kind of analysis that can be done when enormous data sets are built and mined. The project, which started in 2009, required assembling 88 million reports of individual cases of disease, much of it from the weekly morbidity reports in the library of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then the reports had to be converted to digital formats. 

Most of the data entry — 200 million keystrokes — was done by Digital Divide Data, a social enterprise that provides jobs and technology training to young people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya.

Haiyan/Yolanda: Death toll now 5,632

Via the Manila Bulletin: Typhoon toll updated. The deaths are somewhat more than those given in the last tally by the Official Gazette. Excerpt:

The cost of damage brought by super-typhoon “Yolanda” has reached the P30-billion mark while the death toll slightly increased to 5,632, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said yesterday. 

Of the P30,600,369,130.21 total cost of damage, the NDRRMC said P15,620,130,890 was in infrastructure broken down as P12,769,017,240 – roads, bridges, and other structures; P230,393,000 – flood control; P310,897,000 – health facilities; and P2,309,823,650 – schools. 

Damage to agriculture was pegged at P14,980,238,240 with P5,948,165,752 – rice, corn, and other crops; P2,213,064,299 – livestock; P4,955,985,658 – fisheries; P212,700,000 – irrigation facilities; and P1,650,322,530 – other agricultural infrastructure. 

Latest data released by the NDRRMC showed that “Yolanda,” which swept away villages when it roared into the Visayas last Nov. 8, totally destroyed 582,827 houses and damaged 586,082 others. Even the sturdiest infrastructures were not spared from destruction. 

The typhoon affected 2,335,031 families or 10,999,244 people in 12,014 villages in 44 provinces. 

Of the total affected population, 48,084 families or 218,512 people remain sheltered in 1,084 evacuation centers, more than three weeks after the storm.