| This weeks
FactFile is taken from 'SuperBugs - Rogue Diseases
of the Twenty-First Century' by Pete Moore! See details
of the book at Amazon.com
or Amazon.co.uk
2601/ The word vaccinate
has its roots in the Latin vaca, meaning "cow"
- reflecting the origins of its discovery in 1796 by English
pysician Edward Jenner in finding a vaccine for Smallpox through
first infecting with the less virulent disease Cowpox.
2602/ Within four years
of the first vaccination on May 14th 1796 to eight year old
James Phipps about 100,000 people had been vaccinated throughout
the world. In 1805 Napoleon had all his troops that had not
had smallpox vaccinated and ordered the vaccination of all
civilians a year later.
2603/ Diseases such as
respiratory infections, diarrhoeal diseases, tuberculosis,
malaria and measles still claim a total of 9.2 million people
a year.
2604/ A year 2000 report
by the UK's Department of Health showed that almost one in
ten people who go into a hospital for treatment become infected
while they are there. As many as 5,000 people die as a direct
result of that infection and a further 15,000 deaths could
be partly attributable to the hospital bugs. Treating these
infections costs an estimated £1 billion per year.
2605/ The main culprit
of hospital infections is Staphylococcus aureus,
an extremely common bacterium. About one third of the population
have it lurking in crevasses on their skin, but problems start
if it gains entry to the body because it can cause boils and
blood poisoning.
2606/ The problem of
hospital infections has been made worse as some bacterium
have developed means of evading one of our most potent antibiotics,
methicillin. These methicillin-resistant Streptococcus
aureus (MRSA) bacteria are potentially lethal and are
now believed to inhabit almost all of the hospitals in the
UK, and a similar picture is found throughout the developed
world.
2607/ In November 1999,
Brian Duerden, the deputy director of Britain's Public Health
Laboratory Service, warned that MRSA has reached "near
epidemic" levels, saying that it is now held responsible
for thirty-seven per cent of fatal cases of blood poisoning,
compared to only three per cent eight years earlier.
2608/ In 1999, Rosalind
Plowman from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
claimed that reducing hospital infections by just 10 per cent
could release £93.1 million, while saving 364,056 bed
days. The true figure could be about twice this number, as
hospitals only record infections that manifest themselves
while the patient is still in the ward. Those who acquire
an infection in hospital, but only become ill once they get
home, are not included in the statistics.
2609/ Viruses don't carry
around all the baggage needed to make a fully living organism.
They are simply a parcel containing a code - and often that
code has lethal consequences if it takes control. The largest
are about 450 nanometres (about 0.000014 inches) and the smallest
are 20 nanometres (0.0000008 inches). Even using the most
sophisticated light microscopes only the largest viruses can
be seen.
2610/ In 1935, the American
biochemist Wendell Meredith Stanley crystallised tobacco mosaic
virus, demonstrating that viruses had regular shapes, and
in 1939 tobacco mosaic virus was first visualised using the
electron microscope. For several decades viruses were referred
to as filterable agents, and gradually the term virus
(Latin for "slimy liquid" or "poison")
was employed strictly for this new class of infectious agents.
2611/ The USA's National
Nosocomial Infections Surveilance Unit estimates that hospital-acquired
infections affect more than two million patients each year
in th US, bearing a price tag of over $4.5 billion.
2612/ The world's worst
outbreak of cryptosporidiosis, a severe diarrhoeal disease
caused by a water-borne protozoa, occurred in April 1993 in
Milwaukee, USA. Untreated water from a spring contaminated
the local drinking water and out of the 800,000 people who
relied on this particular source, some 370,000 became ill,
4,400 of whom had to go to hospital. Forty people are believed
to have died as a result of the infection.
2613/ In 1985, the aggressive
tiger mosquito slipped unnoticed into the United States inside
a shipment of water-logged tyres that had just arrived from
Asia. Within two years the mosquitoes had established themselves
in seventeen states, bringing with them their payload of yellow
fever, dengue and other diseases.
2614/ Early in 1991,
so the theory goes, a Chinese ship docked near Chancay, a
coastal district of Peru just north of the capital, Lima.
Unknown to its crew, the water in its sewage tanks was contaminated
with cholera. The people of Peru soon found out, because when
it was discharged into the sea the bacteria sparked off an
epidemic that spread rapidly through South and Central America.
Hundreds of thousands of people became infected and some eleven
thousand people died.
2615/ The "Black
Death" of 1347, so called because of the black spots
it produced on the skin, or the blackening colour of limbs
as the tissue started to die. Killed between seventteen and
fifty-five million people out of a total European population
of one hundred and fifty million.
2616/ At its peak, The
Great Plague of London in 1665 killed seven thousand people
per week and in total wiped out a third of London's half a
million population. The disease disapeared in 1666 when a
vast area of London was destroyed in a single fire - the Great
Fire of London.
2617/ An outbreak of
Smallpox during the time of Mark Anthony (Marcus Aurelius
Antonine - 61 - 30 B.C) wreaked havoc on the Roman Empire
killing between 3.5 million and seven million people.
2618/ Botulism toxin
is one of the most toxic compounds known. Ten milligrams,
the equivalent of a few grains of sugar, is enough to kill
twenty-five people. On a weight basis, this makes it fifteen
thousand times more potent than VX nerve gas and one hundred
thousand times more powerful than the nerve gas Sarin, the
nerve agent used in the terrorist attack in the subway system
of Tokyo in March 1995.
2619/ The scale of antibiotic
production is staggering. In 1949, the United States produced
over seventy-two tons of penicillin and streptomycin a year.
By 1954 this had risen to two hundred tons and at the turn
of the millenium the US pharmaceutical industry is pumping
out a staggering two hundred thousand tons per year.
2620/ About 6% of patients
acquire an infection in hospital, and the incidence of hospital-acquired
infections may be increasing.
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