A place for the latest news, information and discussion regarding disasters, terrorism, emerging infectious diseases, disaster response, mitigation and preparedness!
Danielle George – AHN Staff
(AHN) – The latest National Hurricane Center advisory says that tropical depression three has strengthened into Tropical Storm Chantal, with an estimated maximum winds of 40 mph.
According to the advisory, Chantal is located 330 miles south of Halifax, Nova Scotia and is a fast moving storm.
Tropical Storm Chantal is no longer a threat to the United States, according to the hurricane center.
BRITISH police admit they passed on wrong information to Australian police, leading to the arrest of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef in Brisbane, but there are no plans for an investigation.
A former senior British police commander has attacked Scotland Yard over the quality of information it passed to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), prompting Dr Haneef’s arrest.
He was initially charged with recklessly providing support to a terrorist organisation, but the charges had to be dropped after the case against him collapsed.
But a Scotland Yard spokesman said while the initial information British police received about Dr Haneef was wrong, there were no plans to hold an internal investigation about the quality of the details passed on to the AFP.
“Errors were made,” the spokesman said.
“The initial information provided wasn’t correct but it was quickly remedied.
“It had no impact on the charging decision or any subsequent actions.”
Asked if Scotland Yard would apologise to Dr Haneef, the spokesman refused to say.
“There’s nothing to say in terms of what we are considering doing,” he said.
Dr Haneef was held without charge for 12 days following his arrest at Brisbane International Airport on July 2.
He was eventually charged with one count of providing support to a terrorist organisation for having given his mobile phone SIM card to a relative linked to a plot to bomb targets in Britain.
British police originally said the SIM card was found in a burning Jeep used in a terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport.
It was in fact located in searches at Liverpool, 250km away.
The Indian national was finally released on Friday after the case against him collapsed, and he flew home to India at the weekend.
Former Scotland Yard commander John O’Connor said both British detectives and the AFP should be embarrassed by the incident.
The AFP should have spent more time corroborating information given to them by Scotland Yard before arresting Dr Haneef, he told ABC radio.
Mummy’s Artificial Toe Could Be World’s Oldest Prosthesis
Monday , July 30, 2007
By Charles Q. Choi
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An artificial big toe found on the foot of an Egyptian mummy could prove to be the world’s earliest functioning prosthetic body part, it was announced today.
Volunteers who have lost their right big toe are now being recruited to see how effective replicas of the prosthesis are.
The fake toe from the Cairo museum in Egypt was found in 2000 in a tomb near the ancient city of Thebes. Archaeologists speculated the 50- to 60-year-old woman the prosthesis came from might have lost her toe due to complications from diabetes.
The wood and leather prosthesis dates from 1069 to 664 B.C., based on artifacts it was found with in the mummy’s burial chamber. This means it predates what was previously thought of as the earliest known functioning prosthesis, the Roman Capua Leg, a bronze artifact dating from about 300 B.C. The leg was once at the Royal College of Surgeons in London but was destroyed by bombing during World War II.
Replicas of a second false Egyptian right big toe on display at the British Museum in London, albeit without its mummy, will also be tested. This artifact, named the Greville Chester Great Toe after the collector who acquired it for the museum in 1881, is made from cartonnage, a sort of papier maché made using linen, glue and plaster. Based on the way the linen threads were spun, it dates from 1295 to 664 B.C.
“If either prosthesis aids walking or balance then the history of prosthetic medicine will be pushed back some 600 to 700 years and credited to the ancient Egyptians,” said researcher Jacky Finch at the University of Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in England. “If either one is functional it may be interesting to manufacture it with modern materials and trial it for use on people with missing toes.”
The Cairo toe is the most likely of the two to be functional, as it is jointed in three places “and shows signs of wear,” Finch said. “It is still attached to the foot of the mummy of a female between 50 and 60 years of age. The amputation site is also well healed.”
The Greville Chester Great Toe also shows signs of wear, suggesting that it may have been worn by its owner in life and not simply attached to the foot during mummification for religious or ceremonial reasons. However, unlike the Cairo specimen, the Greville Chester Great Toe does not bend and so is likely to have been more cosmetic.
The ancient Egyptians often restored artificial body parts to corpses, which means what might appear to be useful prosthetics actually were not. “The theology of Osiris, the god of the dead, stated that the body, in order to be effective during the afterlife, should be complete,” Finch explained. “Osiris himself, according to myth, was cut up and his body parts scattered and later reunited.”
Scientists have found a variety of artificial body parts restored on mummies, including feet, legs, noses, ears—and even penises. “You were still able to procreate in the afterlife,” Finch told LiveScience.
To see if the toes were functional and not simply cosmetic, the researchers hope to build replicas of the toes and test them by the end of this year. Finding suitable volunteers missing their right big toes “is proving quite difficult, but we are compiling a list,” Finch said.
Tuesday, July 31st 2007, 4:00 AM
LOS ANGELES – A surgeon prescribed excessive morphine to a disabled patient to speed his death so his organs could be harvested, police said yesterday.
Prosecutors said Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of San Francisco gave the drugs to 26-year-old Ruben Navarro in 2006.
Navarro was taken in a coma to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center after suffering respiratory and cardiac arrest.
Although Navarro was found to have irreversible brain damage and was kept on a respirator, he was not considered brain-dead because he still had limited brain function. He died the next day.
Source: NYDailyNews
Transplant surgeon in California accused of administering drugs to hasten death (5:15 p.m)
LOS ANGELES– A surgeon in California was charged with prescribing excessive drugs to a comatose, disabled patient to hasten his death and harvest his organs for transplantation.
Prosecutors said Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, a 33-year-old Iranian-born U.S. citizen, gave a harmful drug and prescribed excessive doses of morphine and a sedative to 26-year-old Ruben Navarro, who died in 2006.
In 2006, a report from federal regulators said Roozrokh ordered Navarro to receive 200 milligrams of morphine and 80 milligrams of the sedative Ativan – far in excess of the usual doses.
Though, Rosa, Navarro’s mother, filed a medical practice lawsuit against Roozrokh , the coroner’s office this year determined that Navarro died of natural causes.
Roozrokh was charged with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and unlawful controlled substance prescription. If convicted of all three counts, he faces up to eight years in state prison or up to one year in jail and a $20,000 (euro14,642) fine as a condition of probation. (AP)
Intro: We’re checking on the Chinese and they’re retaliating. From Reuters, “China in turn has tightened inspections of U.S. imports at its ports, and halted shipments of poultry, pigeons and meat as unsafe.” Who can blame them after the Castleberry botulism incident? Looks like a good old-fashion, intercontinental food fight:
Reuters, 7/30/07: A U.S. delegation arrives in Beijing on Tuesday on a five-day fact-finding mission on food and drug safety amid a series of health scares about the “made in China” label.
The United States stepped up inspections of imports from China after a chemical additive in pet food caused the death of pets there this spring.
Since then, poisonous ingredients have been found in Chinese exports of toys, toothpaste and fish, while the deaths of patients in Panama was blamed on improperly labeled Chinese chemicals that were mixed into cough syrup.
“Our U.S. regulatory agencies are concerned about what they see as insufficient infrastructure across the board in China to assure the safety, quality and effectiveness of many products exported to the United States,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
Following the mission, China and the United States would begin discussions to develop bilateral agreements on food and feed safety and on drug and medical-device safety, the statement said.
The two countries hope to have “strong, action-oriented documents” by December, it added.
Last week, EU Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kuneva urged China to step up export quality. She said she had seen some improvement in how China handled EU warnings of faulty or substandard goods, but much more was needed to be done.
Earlier this month, the head of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the visitors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would specifically discuss a dispute over China’s seafood exports.
The FDA last month banned imports of Chinese farm-raised catfish, shrimp, dace and eel unless their suppliers could prove they were free of certain veterinary substances, which pose no immediate health risk but could be a problem in the long run.
China in turn has tightened inspections of U.S. imports at its ports, and halted shipments of poultry, pigeons and meat as unsafe.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is currently on a visit to China where he is due to press for faster appreciation of the yuan and other financial reforms.
COMMENT: If I was trapped in a mine and had been for some 50 hours…..milk would not be my beverage of choice!
Milk sent down to keep 69 miners alive
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-07-31 13:28
SHANXIAN, Henan — Rescuers have sent 400 kilograms of milk through ventilation pipes to 69 miners who have been trapped for more than 50 hours in a flooded coal mine in central China’s Henan Province.
They cleaned up the 800-meter-long ventilation pipes on Monday night and sent milk down the pit.
Experts with the emergency rescue headquarters in Shanxian county said this would hopefully prolong the miners’ lives and give rescuers more time to eventually save them.
Rescuers are working all-out to clean up the slush in the shaft and drain the flood water.
An estimated 4,000 cubic meters of water poured into the shaft when flood triggered by rainstorm swamped the Zhijian coal mine at 8:40 a.m. on Sunday in Shanxian county of Sanmenxia city, about 200 kilometers west of Henan’s provincial capital Zhengzhou.
By Tuesday morning, the rescuers had reduced the water level in the shaft by 0.7 meter.
The rescuers have also maintained contact, through a fixed line phone in the pit, with the trapped miners.
The miners said the area where they were trapped was dry and had electricity. No one reported any injuries, but they felt cold and hungry.
Altogether 102 miners were working in the pit when the flood occurred. Only 33 of the miners managed to escape.
The floodwater was said to have come from a nearby river.
Hundreds of rescuers, including armed police, are struggling to prevent more water from entering the shaft, clearing away the silt, and providing ventilation and oxygen to the trapped miners.
This state-owned mine was established in 1958. It was designed to produce 210,000 tons a year, but its actual annual output is 300,000 tons.
As the country reels under economic, political and environmental troubles, Indonesia has a new burden to shoulder: an airlines’ ban that has a direct impact on its tourism.The European Union officially banned all 51 Indonesian airlines from flying to Europe starting on July 6, while the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in April declared Indonesia had failed to comply with international safety standards.
Indonesia has dozens of low-cost airlines following the deregulation of the industry in the late 1990s, leading to a quadrupling of passenger numbers over the past seven years. But its air-safety record has been under fire following two commercial airline crashes that killed 123 people this year alone.
EU’s Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot said the blacklist is considered an important tool in preventing unsafe airlines from flying to Europe and in informing passengers worldwide of safety problems.
“Honestly, the blacklist itself is not surprising since we have had many airline accidents recently,” Indonesian Transport Ministry director general for aviation Budi Mulyawan Suyitno said. “Although there is no direct impact — because no Indonesian airlines have been flying to Europe since 2004 — we will improve our safety measures for Indonesian airlines,” he said.
Even so, the Indonesian government had earlier ignored two letters of inquiry the EU sent to the transport ministry, before it decided to blacklist the country’s airlines.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono immediately expressed disappointment at the ban, calling it “the European Union’s unilateral action,” and demanding more room for dialogue.
Transport Minister Jusman Djamal mulled a tit-for-tat action by hinting at the option of restricting access to its airspace for EU planes, or of advising its citizens not to fly with European airlines.
But the latter invitation is likely to fall on deaf ears, as many polls conducted by local media show that most Indonesians are in fact worried about flying with their national airlines due to their poor safety records.
“I demand the government improve the quality and safety of our transportation immediately,” Laksmindra Setyawati, 30, an employee with an international NGO in Jakarta said. Although government officials downplayed the impact, the EU’s ban has already begun hurting tourism.
“European Union’s airline ban has definitely put a burden on Indonesian tourism, especially now that it’s the summer high-season for tourist arrivals,” Bali Tourism Board chairman Ngurah Wijaya said. “I know many tourists have canceled their visits.
“It will not only effect tourist arrivals, but will also hurt Indonesia’s economy, because it will decrease hotel occupancy rates, souvenir sales, and other things related to tourism,” Wijaya said.
Indonesia has set a target of 6 million foreign visitors for this year and 8 million in 2009 nationwide.
The country had missed its tourist-arrival target of 5.5 million in 2006, registering 4.8 million foreign visitors for the year.
To help sweeten the package for foreigners, the government has allowed the citizens of 63 countries to be granted visas on arrival in the archipelago nation.
But the European Union contributes about 25 percent of tourist to the resort island of Bali alone, with as many as 600,000 European tourists visiting the country each year.
“European tourists are in fact important to Indonesian tourism,” Wijaya said.
He explained that since Bali has an international airport facility, tourists who already planned their holiday before the ban took effect may yet fly to Bali with other airlines via Singapore.
“But it will definitely hurt other parts of Indonesia’s tourism spots like Yogyakarta, Borneo and Sulawesi island, since tourists then have to take domestic flights,” Wijaya said.
Indonesia’s efforts to improve air safety following a string of accidents and near-misses has so far resulted in revoking licenses of four airlines and suspending five others for failing to comply with basic standards in late June.
Earlier this month, Indonesia signed a joint declaration with International Civil Aviation Organization pledging to improve safety, restructure and strengthen the supervisory capacity of the air transport directorate-general, and meet international standards.
“Our country’s tourism image has been damaged by strings of terrorist attacks, natural disasters and diseases such as bird flu, we can’t afford to lose more tourists by this airlines ban,” Wijaya said.
“We can’t just provide excuses anymore, it is a fact that our image is terrible, we need to do something about it before other countries follow EU’s ban,” he said.
KHNL-NBC 7/28/07: A Maui man hospitalized for a suspected case of botulism is back home Saturday.
The “patient.” I don’t see the ptosis, the one-sided droolling, or the facial asymmetry. Could be that’s why he was discharged. Botulinum toxin results are pending.
33-year-old Jonathan Stockton was hospitalized after eating a recalled can of chili earlier this week. He was taken to Maui Memorial Medical Center after experiencing symptoms of botulism poisoning — including paralysis of his eyes, cheeks and tongue.
“Its been quite a process. Its pretty frightening to be on the bed there and seeing these things move top down, down toward my mouth and my chin area, just wondering if they were going to start restrict my breathing,” says Stockton.
So far, state officials have not confirmed whether Stockton had botulism poisoning. Samples were taken from Stockton, although it will be several days until the results are ready. He had been kept overnight to ensure that the numbness Stockton was feeling didn’t spread.
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The “patient.” I don’t see the ptosis, the one-sided droolling, or the facial asymmetry. Could be that’s why he was discharged. Botulinum toxin results are pending.
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