MEDICS BATTLE TO TRACE A KILLER INFECTION

The mystery illness behind the deaths of seven Irish heroin addicts
has so far baffled the best scientific minds and the investigation
which is now underway on both sides of the Atlantic is set to take
some time before any light is shed on the tragedy.

The Eastern Regional Health Authority said yesterday another woman may
have fallen victim to the illness and the results of a post mortem are
awaited. Seven other addicts have survived and a number of these have
now been discharged from hospital. Gardai have provided the names of
other addicts who died over recent weeks and their records are also
being probed which could yet add to the death toll.

The bizarre nature of the Dublin mini-epidemic however is mirrored by
similar deaths which have affected addicts in Scotland and although
there are no definite answers medical experts there are speculating it
could be due to some unidentified bacteria. The theory has been put
forward that addicts in Dublin and Glasgow could have been given
heroin from the same suspicious batch. The Irish deaths have mostly
been concentrated on people from the south east of the city.

The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is now
looking at tissue samples and may be able to uncover what kind of
bacteria is involved. So far it is clear however that the infection
has been confined to addicts who injected directly into the muscle
rather than a vein. This in turn weakens the tissue and makes it more
susceptible to bacterial invasion.

The very nature of heroin addiction however and the scattered
lifestyle that goes with it means that even intensive efforts by
health board staff to warn them of the dangers are being ignored in
many cases although over seventy have come forward to seek methadone
treatment.

The saga has emerged only in the last four weeks the toll of Irish and
Scottish addicts since then has climbed steadily.

It was in the Scottish city, with one of the worst heroin problems in
Europe that the first deaths were recorded in the early days of May.

Two female heroin-users turned up at the casualty department in the
Victoria Infirmary in the south of the city with abscesses that
appeared no different from the tissue infections common around the
injecting area of drugs users.

They were given the normal treatment of antibiotics, but the abscesses
grew rapidly and their condition deteriorated fast as they developed a
severe blood poisoning or septicaemic-type illness.

Despite receiving intensive medical treatment, they suffered multiple
organ failure and were dead within hours. Medics who care for drug
addicts are used to treating gruesome symptoms of infection which the
individuals are prone to develop because of their low tolerance to
infection.

But the deaths in Glasgow immediately alerted medics there to a
potential new strain of infection in the drug addict community. When
more cases began to present in the hospital emergency clinics, allied
to deaths of addicts in their own flats and houses a fullscale alert
when into action.

Analysis of samples taken from the dead proved inconclusive in
pin-pointing the source of the killer infection. Rumours swept the
drug communities that spiked heroin, deliberately contaminated was the
culprit. Other rumours claimed scientists had discovered antrax like
bacterium associated with the heroin. This it was claimed could have
been introduced in the country of cultivation in the Far East where
anthrax is still common in farming communities.

All of these rumours were later discounted but as the weeks past the
first of the deaths in Dublin raised the nightmare scenario that
killer strain of infection threatened drug users throughout these islands.

While many of the cases so little similarities, with the cause of
death varying widely from addict to addict there are a core of cases
which do show strikingly similar features. In Glasgow at least 13 of
the deaths were located in the area known as Govanhill, a rundown area
of tenement flats just south of city centre. All had injected straight
into muscle tissue, mostly around the groin. All had developed
horrendous abscesses before their condition deteriorated.