World

Malaysia Battles Deadly Virus

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 22, 1999 / 9:00 AM EST / CBS

Amid wholesale slaughter of possibly infected pigs, a team of U.S. experts arrived in Malaysia this weekend to help officials cope with an outbreak of a brain-destroying virus that has killed more than 50 people.

The researchers from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up an office and laboratory in the Malaysian Health Ministry, a U.S. Embassy official said. Two Australian experts were due Tuesday.

The experts, invited to Malaysia by the ministry, arrived as soldiers shot thousands of pigs for the third day in an effort to exterminate all animals suspected of carrying the virus. The outbreak is one of the country's worst viral epidemics.

Japanese encephalitis, which attacks the brain and causes high fever, vomiting and coma, is transmitted from pigs to humans by the Culex mosquito.

With the overnight death of a 31-year-old pig farmer, the death toll rose to more than 50 nationwide on Monday. At least 40 of those deaths have occurred since January in the Negri Sembilan area, 60 miles southeast of the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

At least 54 people suspected to be suffering from Japanese encephalitis have been admitted to hospitals.

Deputy Director-General of Health Abdul Aziz Mahmood warned that a new strain of the virus is believed to be transmitted through direct contact with infected pigs.

"Those coming in contact with pigs or pork should take the necessary precautions and play it safe," Abdul Aziz was quoted as saying in the New Straits Times on Monday. "Precautions include wearing protective clothing."

Authorities had set a target of killing 64,000 pigs. But on Sunday they announced that more than 322,000 pigs would be killed.

On Monday, police cordoned off vast areas containing hog farms where soldiers herded pigs and shot them.

In other areas, hog farmers grew impatient and starting clubbing their own pigs to death or dumping them into mass graves to suffocate or be buried alive, eyewitnesses said.

The government issued a directive to local newspapers Monday to stop publishing the gruesome photographs of pigs being shot to death in their pens or mass graves.

As word of the outbreak spread, neighboring Singapore and Thailand banned imports of some Malaysian livestock. Stoking worries that the disease may spread, one person is thought to have died in Singapore and several more may have been infected.

Although the majority of Malaysians are Muslims who don't eat pork, the country is the leading pork producer in Southeast Asia. Pork prices have plummeted and the government has set up a fund to help devastated hog farmers.

While most of the farm workers and residents who died in areas with infected pigs were found to have Japanese encephalitis, doctors said they also found a virus called Hendra in some hospitalized patients. Health authorities are still uncertain whether the viruses were related.

Two animal disease xperts from Australia, where the Hendra virus killed a horse trainer and 16 horses in Queensland in 1994, were to arrive in Malaysia Tuesday.