‘It is inevitable we will have a global outbreak’….within five years.

The symptoms appear suddenly with a headache, high fever, joint pain, stomach pain and vomiting.

As the illness progresses, patients can develop large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding. In at least 30  per cent of cases, Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever is fatal.

And so it proved this month when a 38-year-old garage owner from Glasgow, who had been to his brother’s wedding in Afghanistan, became the UK’s first confirmed victim of the tick-borne viral illness when he died at the high-security infectious disease unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital.

It is a disease widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia — and one that has jumped the species barrier to infect humans with deadly effect.

But the unnamed man’s death was not the only time recently a foreign virus had struck in this country for the first time. 

Last month, a 49-year-old man entered London’s St Thomas’ hospital with a raging fever, severe cough and desperate difficulty in breathing.

He bore all the hallmarks of the deadly Sars virus that killed nearly 1,000 people in 2003 — but blood tests quickly showed that this terrifyingly virulent infection was not Sars. Nor was it any other virus yet known to medical science.

Worse still, the gasping, sweating patient was rapidly succumbing to kidney failure, a potentially lethal complication that had never before been seen in such a case.

As medical staff quarantined their critically-ill patient, fearful questions began to mount. The stricken man had recently come from Qatar in the Middle East. What on earth had he picked up there? Had he already infected others with it?

Using the latest high-tech gene-scanning technique, scientists at the Health Protection Agency started to piece together clues from tissue samples taken from the Qatari patient, who was now hooked up to a life-support machine. 

The results were extraordinary. Yes, the virus is from the same family as Sars. But its make-up is completely new. It has come not from humans, but from animals. Its closest known relatives have been found in Asiatic bats.

The investigators also discovered that the virus has already killed someone. Searches of global medical databases revealed the same mysterious virus lurking in samples taken from a 60-year-old man who had died in Saudi Arabia in July.

Armageddon virus: call to keep killer recipe secret

 

“I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one,” Keim was quoted as saying. “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

 

Two top scientific journals say they are deciding whether to publish details of a man-made mutant flu virus that could kill billions, after a US government’s science advisory committee advised them to withhold key details.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) urged the US journal Science and the British journal Nature to withhold key details so people seeking to harm the public would not be able to manufacture the virus that could cause mass deaths.

Many scientists and public health officials are concerned that the virus could evolve in nature into a form that is transmissible among humans – an event that could potentially make this deadly virus an extremely serious global public health threat

The virus in question is an H5N1 bird flu strain that was genetically altered in a Dutch lab so it can pass easily between ferrets.

That means it is likely contagious among humans for the first time, and could trigger a lethal pandemic if it emerged in nature or were set loose by terrorists, experts have said.

Scientists agree to edit manuscripts

One of the scientists behind the H5N1 research told Science his team would remove some details of their work from their manuscript.

But they disagreed with the NSABB’s conclusions, virologist Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, told Science.

“This is unprecedented,” he said, adding that the manuscript had been sent by Science to the NSABB for another review.

The lead scientist of the other research, which was submitted to Nature, has also agreed to adhere to NSABB’s findings, a spokesman for his university said.

Virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the US was working with Nature‘s editors to alter the manuscript, university spokesman Terry Devitt said.

“We are doing our best to be as responsible as we can be,” Mr Devitt told Science.

‘Extremely serious global public health threat’

The NSABB reviewed two scientific papers relating to the findings and recommended that the journals “make changes in the manuscripts”, a statement said, warning of an “extremely serious global public health threat”.

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