Guess Death isn't taking a holiday this year.
Also there is a resurgence of yellow fever, which has escaped it's normal bounds in Africa but each time has been caught and not spread elsewhere.
That's a bad one, too.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11432522/yellow-fever-virus-outbreak-angola
Why a yellow fever outbreak in Angola is a "potential threat for the entire world"
Yellow fever, a much-feared mosquito-borne virus, has sickened thousands of people and killed hundreds in Angola over the past five months.
A cluster of cases first appeared in Angola's capital, Luanda, in December, and the virus has now sickened people in 16 of the country’s 18 provinces. People infected in Angola have already taken the virus to China, Kenya, Mauritania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (where at least 21 people have died), a pattern that has the World Health Organization very worried.
"This outbreak," the agency said this week, "constitutes a potential threat for the entire world."
A leading researcher of mosquito-borne diseases, Duane Gubler at Duke-NUS Medical School, is gravely concerned about the outbreak too. "We're sitting on a time bomb waiting for it to blow," he said, "and we're really not doing anything about it."
As scientists try to get a grip on the outbreak in Angola, one fact is already clear: Many other countries are at risk because they're not adequately prepared. Yellow fever is part of an uptick in mosquito-borne diseases all over the world that are suddenly threatening global heath in new and scary ways.
We've had a yellow fever vaccine since 1936, but the global stockpile is running low
yellow fever vaccine
BSIP / Getty
The vaccine for yellow fever. (BSIP/Getty)
Unlike Zika, a virus that until recently was little understood and hardly bothered humans, yellow fever has plagued humanity for centuries.
The virus is carried by infected mosquitoes, most commonly the Aedes aegypti, the same type that carries Zika and dengue. But yellow fever is a much deadlier disease. Symptoms in most people are mild and flu-like: muscle pain, fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, and fatigue. But 15 percent of patients go on to experience a much more severe second phase of illness: high fever, yellowing of the skin and eyes, internal bleeding, and organ failure. Of those, up to half die within two weeks.
The first epidemic was reported in 1648, according to JAMA. In 1793, a yellow fever outbreak wiped out 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia (then the capital of the United States), "causing 17,000 people, including President Washington and other members of the federal government, to flee to the countryside," according to one history of the disease. In 1878, an epidemic "destroyed" Memphis, Tennessee, killing 5,000.
There's no cure for yellow fever, but a vaccine was developed in 1936, and it's highly effective. Within three or four weeks after receiving the shot, nearly all people are protected from the virus. But in order for the vaccine to really prevent outbreaks, many people need to be immunized.
That's not happening in many parts of Africa, including Angola, where the virus is endemic. Starting in 2006, the World Health Organization, with support from Gavi (an international organization focused on improving vaccine access), ramped up efforts to make sure at-risk communities get vaccinated. But many countries on the continent still have vaccine coverage rates that are much too low to make the vaccine effective.
Take Nigeria. According to Gavi, yellow fever immunization coverage stood at just 49 percent in 2014. There, an outbreak that started in 1986 eventually infected 116,000 people and killed 24,000.
To stop the outbreak, more people in and around Angola will need to be immunized. But there's a big problem with this strategy: Vaccine stockpiles are running low. "We have a vaccine," said Seth Berkley, head of Gavi, "but we don't have adequate supplies."
Since the Angolan outbreak sparked late last year, the WHO has given more than 6 million doses to people in the country of more than 21 million. That push quickly depleted the international emergency stockpile.
"We don't use [the vaccine] for prevention — we use it for emergency response," said Gubler.
Berkley noted that when the outbreak started to spread in Angola, the systems in place to scale vaccine production couldn't meet the rapid uptick in demand.
Globally, there are six manufacturers of yellow fever vaccine. But supply is usually low because there have been few outbreaks in recent years, and the disease hasn't been as much of a priority for global health groups relative to other diseases.
Researchers fear spread beyond Angola
CDC
Areas with risk of yellow fever virus transmission in Africa.
Health officials are now urging authorities to rapidly increase vaccine production in the event that the virus continues to spread in Angola and beyond. For now, all the cases outside Angola originated in Angola, which means the virus isn't transmitting anywhere else.
The parts of the world at greatest immediate risk are highly urbanized areas in sub-Saharan Africa and South America, where a combination of a warm climate, weak health systems, a ready mosquito vector, and densely packed populations with unvaccinated people is particularly worrisome, according to Gubler. (Much of South America is already currently battling outbreaks of dengue and Zika, again both related to yellow fever and carried by the same mosquito.)
But there's a real worry that it could spread to countries in Asia, including China, where immunization rates are practically nonexistent. Already, six unvaccinated guest workers from China returned from Angola with the virus. And infectious disease experts there foresee a potential public health emergency.
"With growing migration and an increasing density of Aedes aegypti [mosquitoes] in Asia, there is an increased risk of yellow fever outbreaks in Asia," researchers from Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center wrote in a recent paper. "If no action is taken, it may spread in Southern China."
