China is taking steps to ensure that the yellow fever outbreak in Sudan does not come back to the country by scanning travelers, reports the New York Times.

Local health authorities were asked to scan all travelers arriving from Sudan for fevers. Chinese citizens planning travel to Sudan were advised to get yellow fever shots. Customs officers were told that containers arriving from Sudan might have stray infected mosquitoes inside.

Sudan’s epidemic is considered the world’s worst in 20 years. Sweden, Britain and other donors have paid for vaccinations. The United States Navy’s laboratory in Egypt has helped with diagnoses.

Estimates of the number of Chinese working in Africa, many in the oil and mining industries or on major construction projects, range from 500,000 to 1 million. Experts onAIDS have previously warned that the workers could become a new means of bringing that disease to China, which has a low H.I.V.-infection rate.

ProMED-mail, a Web site that follows emerging diseases, has tracked reports about the Sudan outbreak, with its moderators adding valuable context. China’s mosquito-killing winters make a large yellow fever outbreak there unlikely, moderators said. But Sudan’s containment efforts are troubled. For example, vaccinated people cannot get cards proving they have had shots, but the cards are reported to be for sale at police checkpoints.

Australia’s now-endemic dengue fever, according to ProMED moderators, may have come from mosquitoes arriving in containers from East Timor.

January 8, 2012

Uganda is falling short on its goal to provide ARV treatment to 80% of people living with HIV. IRIN reports:

Some 62 percent of those needing HIV treatment were on ARVs in March 2012, up from 50 percent in 2010. Uganda managed to enrol an estimated 65,493 new HIV cases on life-prolonging ARVs in 2012, bringing to 356,056 the number of those receiving ARVs, according to UAC statistics.

But just 8 percent of these cases were children. A recent government survey has revealed that just 49 percent of infants in need of treatment are receiving it. (The government recommends that all HIV-positive infants under age two receive ARVs.) Some 20,000 to 24,000 children are infected with HIV each year, according to the Ministry of Health.

To improve the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, the government launched in September 2012 the UN World Health Organization’s “Option B+” strategy, which involves giving HIV-positive mothers triple-therapy ARVs as soon as they are diagnosed, and continuing treatment for life, regardless of their CD4 count.

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The government has been urged to set up an “AIDS levy” to generate additional revenue for HIV prevention, treatment and care.

“Budgeting by government for the AIDS response must increase as a matter of urgency for the financial year 2013-14 and beyond, prioritizing recurrent costs such as health worker recruitment and retention and procurement of essential commodities rather than trainings, workshops and seminars,” civil society groups said in a statement.

The Ugandan government recently developed a draft working paper on establishing a US$1 billion HIV fund to explore alternative and sustainable sources of funding for its HIV/AIDS programmes.

Sources of funding listed in the paper, released in September by the Uganda AIDS Commission, include levying taxes on bank transactions and interest, airplane tickets, beer, soft drinks and cigarettes, as well goods and services traded within Uganda.

Small fees would also be levied on civil servants’ salaries. Corporate and withholding taxes would be increased slightly, and a small tax would be added to telephone calls and to each kilowatt of electricity consumed.

January 7, 2013

Pakistan is providing greater security as it resumes polio vaccinations, say officials. From AFP:

UN agencies suspended work on a nationwide campaign to inoculate children against the highly infectious disease after nine health workers were murdered in a string of attacks in the northwest and Karachi in December.

Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world where polio is endemic, but efforts to stamp out the disease have been hampered by resistance from the Taliban, who have banned vaccination teams from some areas, and distrust.

On Tuesday, six women and a man working for a charity involved in polio vaccinations were shot dead in the northwestern district of Swabi.

A senior government official said that instead of pressing another nationwide campaign, authorities had decided to inoculate children in phases, in a low key manner with adequate security arrangements.

Doctor Janbaz Afridi, head of polio eradication in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said that to ensure security, campaigns would be carried out in phases and separately in different districts.

“We had to launch a campaign from January 14, but were not given security clearance, so we reviewed the schedule and modified our policy to do it in phases starting from high-risk districts,” Afridi told AFP.

“The inoculation teams can now go into selected areas with adequate security at any suitable time instead of a province-wide campaign,” he added.

Polio cases in Pakistan have risen sharply in recent years, hitting 198 in 2011 — the highest figure for more than a decade and the most of any country in the world last year, according to the World Health Organization.

Rumours about the vaccine being a plot to sterilise Muslims have long dogged efforts to tackle the disease in Pakistan.

January 4, 2013

Scientists are looking to the clouds to attempt to make predictions for disease outbreaks. The AP reports:

In one recent study, two scientists reported they could predict — more than seven weeks in advance — when flu season was going to peak in New York City. Theirs was just the latest in a growing wave of computer models that factor in rainfall, temperature or other weather conditions to forecast disease.

Health officials are excited by this kind of work and the idea that it could be used to fine-tune vaccination campaigns or other disease prevention efforts.

At the same time, experts note that outbreaks are influenced as much, or more, by human behavior and other factors as by the weather. Some argue weather-based outbreak predictions still have a long way to go. And when government health officials warned in early December that flu season seemed to be off to an early start, they said there was no evidence it was driven by the weather.

This disease-forecasting concept is not new: Scientists have been working on mathematical models to predict outbreaks for decades and have long factored in the weather. They have known, for example, that temperature and rainfall affect the breeding of mosquitoes that carry malaria, West Nile virus and other dangerous diseases.

Recent improvements in weather-tracking have helped, including satellite technology and more sophisticated computer data processing.

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More recently, in east Africa, satellites have been used to predict rainfall by measuring sea-surface temperatures and cloud density. That’s been used to generate “risk maps” for Rift Valley fever — a virus that spreads from animals to people and in severe cases can cause blindness or death. Researchers have said the system in some cases has given two to six weeks advance warning.

Last year, other researchers using satellite data in east Africa said they found that a small change in average temperature was a warning sign cholera cases would double within four months.

“We are getting very close to developing a viable forecasting system” against cholera that can help health officials in African countries ramp up emergency vaccinations and other efforts, said a statement by one of the authors, Rita Reyburn of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, South Korea.

Some diseases are hard to forecast, such as West Nile virus. Last year, the U.S. suffered one of its worst years since the virus arrived in 1999. There were more than 2,600 serious illnesses and nearly 240 deaths.