Suicide bombers may spread disease

Debora MacKenzie

Israeli doctors have discovered a gruesome new way to catch hepatitis and possibly other blood-borne diseases - from the flying bone fragments of suicide bombers.

Itzhak Braverman and emergency staff at the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera treated 32 victims of one blast. They used CT scans to check for metal fragments in the survivors. In one 31-year-old woman, the scan revealed dense fragments in her neck, breast and groin.

But they were not metal. They were bits of bone from the suicide bomber. On a hunch, Braverman sent a fragment to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv to be tested.

It came back positive for hepatitis B. Braverman's team say they think this is "the first report of human bone fragments acting as foreign bodies in a blast injury".

Embedded bone

No one had considered this danger before. "As a result of that case, all survivors of these attacks in Israel are now vaccinated for hepatitis B," says Braverman. He thinks embedded bone fragments should routinely be tested for diseases that might spread this way.

In theory, those could include four kinds of hepatitis, dengue fever, syphilis, CJD and possibly malaria.

The biggest fear is HIV. The bone fragment from the woman tested negative, says Braverman. "But these test kits are designed for blood. It is very hard to test bone," he says, especially for a fragile virus like HIV.

Only 50 cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported in the West Bank and Gaza, according to a 2000 report from the Palestinian National Authority Ministry of Health. But the true extent of infection is difficult to assess.

Journal reference: Israel Medical Association Journal (vol 4, p 528)

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