Dipl. Radu P. Ioan, Consultant Antitero - U.S.A.
Desi inca din 9 Oct. 2006 Presedintele si Premierul Romaniei au fost informati despre declansarea unei noi faze a Razboiului Bio-Terorist, ambii nu au dat importanta avertismentelor primite si propunerii preluarii modelului american de lupta si a Strategiei Casei Albe, care a desemnat inca de atunci PENTAGONUL ca virf de lance, alocandu-i imediat un buget de urgenta de 3,9 Miliarde USD.
Desi li s-a transmis sugestia trimiterii la Washington a Medicului Sef al MAPN si a Sefului Directiei de Profil din Ministerul Sanatatii, PRESEDINTELE BASESCU si Premierul Romaniei au preferat sa lase la latitudinea unui simplu inginer silvic, dl. Flutur, o problema extrem de grava, de importanta si SECURITATE NATIONALA, DE VIATA SI DE MOARTE !
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301676_pf.html
ANIMAL DESEASES AS WARNINGS !
Wider Tracking of Wildlife Illnesses Aimed at Detecting Bio-Attacks -
By D'Vera Cohn - Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 24, 2006; B03
A growing number of scientists and government agencies are engaged in projects to track outbreaks of animal disease that could give a warning of a bioterrorism attack, modeled on the proverbial canary that coal miners carried to alert them to poisons in the air.
They include officials at the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro, who announced this week that they received an Air Force grant to design a national bioterrorism surveillance network that would link data from two dozen North American wildlife hospitals. The center's president, Ed Clark, said it would be "the bird dog out in front trying to get a whiff of what's going on."
A simple example, he said, would be that ducks dying at a reservoir could signal an attempt to poison the water supply.
Other efforts include a new surveillance program to collect daily information from commercial pet hospitals, the recent establishment of a federal "wildlife disease data warehouse" to swap information and the work of the Canary Database at Yale University, which has assembled thousands of scientific articles on links between wildlife and human health.
The projects have two purposes: to create a comprehensive network that will chart wildlife disease outbreaks and to identify threats to people or wildlife populations from them.
Behind them is a recognition that many potential bioweapons are animal diseases. Among them are avian influenza, plague, anthrax, tularemia and cholera. Most emerging infectious diseases, such as avian influenza, SARS and monkeypox, have a wildlife link. Although some diseases are tracked individually, there is no monitoring effort focused broadly on wildlife outbreaks.
The possibility of an avian flu pandemic is fueling a sense of urgency in these efforts. Some scientists say they learned a hard lesson from the mosquito-borne West Nile virus outbreak that began in 1999, which might have been identified more quickly if wildlife researchers and human health researchers had been working with greater cooperation.
"Not every animal disease indicates a human health risk, but some do more than we are always aware of," said Peter Rabinowitz, an associate professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, the main author of a recent journal article concluding that wildlife, livestock or pets could play a key role in signaling an anthrax or plague attack. "Human health professionals don't get a lot of training in this, and we are having to play catch-up."
At the Wildlife Center of Virginia, Clark plans to model his network, called Project Tripwire, after the human-disease monitoring of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The center's $166,000 funding came through Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology.
"There is a tremendous vulnerability in this country to emerging wildlife disease," Clark said. Bio-terrorism is "the scenario of worst-case anticipation," he said, but the network also could serve the broader purpose of sounding alerts about new illnesses that could endanger wildlife populations.
Purdue University scientists and officials of the nation's largest veterinary chain -- Banfield, the Pet Hospital -- announced this month that they were collaborating on a program capable of detecting emerging animal infections that could be transmitted to people. The National Companion Animal Surveillance Program, which would employ daily data from the veterinary clinics, is funded with $1.2 million from the CDC.
Larry Glickman, a professor of epidemiology and environmental medicine at Purdue, said in a statement that routine testing of pet cats and birds could provide a warning about the presence of avian influenza, which both can carry.
At the same time, Interior Department scientists are ramping up the Web-based wildlife disease data warehouse to collect and publish information on outbreaks for a variety of clients, including public health authorities, state game agencies and the public. They will begin testing the network this summer with data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. But there are major shortcomings, among them a lack of money and the fact that participation by state wildlife agencies is voluntary.
"We don't have the infrastructure or the funding, or in some ways the legal mandate, to do this because the rules for reporting human disease and domestic animal disease are fairly well defined but for wildlife disease are not," said F. Joshua Dein, principal investigator with the Interior Department's National Wildlife Health Center.
The state wildlife agencies in Maryland and Virginia plan to participate in the national network, officials in both states said. In those states, biologists and veterinarians mainly target their efforts to check deer for a neurological condition called chronic wasting disease and monitor waterfowl for avian influenza.
Jonathan Sleeman, wildlife veterinarian with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, said the focus on wildlife disease and bioterrorism is part of a broader recognition that wildlife disease is more dangerous than previously thought.
"There's an increasing body of evidence there are wildlife diseases that are a threat to wildlife itself," he said. "There's more contact and a globalized world where wildlife are moving a lot more than they used to. There's an increased opportunity for disease exchange."
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23:13, miercuri, 4 octombrie 2023
