Vital Systems Security

… no good news today. Not avian flu, but swine flu … !

New, deadly swine flu hits Mexico

By Noel Randewich and Armando Tovar
Reuters
Friday, April 24, 2009 11:30 AM

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A deadly strain of swine flu never seen before has broken out in Mexico, killing at least 16 people and raising fears it is spreading across North America.

The World Health Organization said it was concerned about what it called 800 “influenza-like” cases in Mexico, and also about a confirmed outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in the United States.

Mexico canceled classes for millions of children in its sprawling capital city and surrounding areas on Friday after authorities noticed a higher number of deaths involving flu-like illness than normal in recent weeks.

“It is a virus that mutated from pigs and then at some point was transmitted to humans,” Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told the Televisa network.

He linked the disease in Mexico to a new kind of swine flu that struck seven people in California and Texas.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus in the United States was a never-before-seen mixture of viruses typical among pigs, birds and humans. All seven American patients have recovered.

The Mexican government warned people not to shake hands or kiss when greeting or share food, glasses or cutlery for fear of contracting the flu.

Mexico City, one of the world’s biggest cities and home to some 20 million people, was quieter than usual on Friday morning. Normally choking traffic was less chaotic in the absence of school buses and parents driving kids to school.

Many people waiting to enter subway stations had their faces covered with surgical masks.

The virus is an influenza A virus, carrying the designation H1N1. It contains DNA typical to avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses, the CDC has said.

WHO said about 60 people in Mexico have died from the disease. The Geneva-based U.N. agency said it was in daily contact with U.S., Canadian and Mexican authorities and had activated its Strategic Health Operations Center (SHOC) — its command and control center for acute public health events.

Surveillance for and scrutiny of influenza has been stepped up since 2003, when H5N1 bird flu reappeared in Asia. Experts fear this strain, or another strain, could spark a pandemic that could kill millions.

(Additional reporting by Maggie Fox in Washington and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Frances Kerry, Editing by Eric Walsh)

Just a quick note on what is below and what is to come: this post briefly introduces some (re)emergent techniques of zoonotic disease preparedness and surveillance accompanied by a few theoretical implications that, well, seem to overheat quite quickly.

The second post will take a more empirical turn, and will flesh out some of the issues at hand by way of an interview.

Early on in her latest manuscript Donna Haraway proclaims:

Species interdependence is the name of the worlding [ie alternative globalizing] game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention.

This declaration is a slightly modulated echo of the plea of ‘One Medicine’ or ‘One Health,’ a discontinuous cadre of MDs, DVMs, and public health experts that are calling for a renewed focus on interspecies medical entanglements.  Although the movement does include many non-infectious disease elements such as trans-species oncology, shared pet and owner obesity, and perhaps even the ultra-mundane pet-as-tripping hazard, the main thrust of the One Health agenda revolves around the threat posed by zoonoses, or diseases that can hop between animals and humans.

Of particular interest to this blog is the past and proposed further use of animals as biosensors for zoonotic disease (for both ‘natural’ and intentional epidemics). These calls for ‘animals as sentinels’ of disease draw upon the epidemiological triad of animals oft increased exposure to pathogens, reactions at lower doses, and shorter incubation periods in comparison to humans, to sound an early outbreak alarm.  Resonating with the Haraway quotation above, many One Health advocates are requesting more MD respect for and faster response to animals’ sickness as an early indication of human exposures, and for the security community to learn to pay attention to the signs of sentinel species. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m posting this here as well as at the bio-nano blog, since it is a nice point of overlap…

Dupont, the chemical giant, has put its peanut butter in the chocolate belong to Environmental Defense, the environmental action NGO. Or did ED’s chocolate end up in DuPont’s peanut butter? In any case they have teamed up to produce a “NanoRisk Framework” that combines techniques risk analysis and product development to help companies monitor the production of new nanomaterials. It is, at first sight, a surprising partnership, but as it turns out, I guess ED is known for “finding the ways that work” as their website puts it. It is also another example of the desire to bring a public into being, as the framework is publicly distributed, and available for comment until March 30th. It’s a nice document too– the kind of thing that isn’t normally freely available on a website…

Homeland Security Watch, a blog run by CSIS-type Washington policy analysts, should be added to our radar. A recent post announced the publication of a Congressional Research Service report on Homeland Security’s application of “risk-based” grant distribution. The author of the post described Congressional concern with the application of risk analysis to ‘vital systems security’ problems: “Terrorism offers neither the trend lines nor the depth of historical data (thank goodness) needed to design a reliable methodology that risk assessment demands in other cases, such as hurricanes or car accidents.” While I haven’t had a chance to read it, the full report can be found here.

I have been looking a bit into the problem of enactment and war games. In so doing, a couple of interesting links came up, including to a couple first-order practitioners of war gaming, James F. Dunnigan and Kenneth Watman and to an article by James Der Derian at the Watson Institute that is worth a read. In our article on “Distributed Preparedness” Andy and I put forward the idea that imaginative enactment is one of the key techniques of a future oriented (rather than archive-oriented) form of knowledge about collective life. The war game story is clearly an important part of the genealogy of imaginative enactment. Civil defense was one point of transfer from military to civilian affairs. Certainly there are others.

As an aside, Der Derian’s website is very much worth checking out as an effort to produce some online space for security discussions.

I don’t recall whether this has come across our screen before, but this seems to be a center for risk related analytic work and critical social science at LSE. It includes some of the folks in the risk discussions (Beck, Ericson) as well as more technocratic types. Lots of working papers…worth a scan. The seminars look to be on the technical side; I was particularly drawn to one on participatory risk mapping. Also the research fellowships may be of interest to some.