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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A 12-year-old Australian girl and her mother are the first people to try an experimental treatment for a deadly virus after the girl’s horse died from the infection, researchers said late last week.

The virus, called Hendra virus, emerged in Australia in the 1990s and can kill up to 75 percent of people infected.

Christopher Broder of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues sent the treatment, an engineered version of a human immune system protein, to the girl after hearing about the viral outbreak.

Australian media said the girl and her mother took the first doses of the drug on Thursday.

“There was an outbreak last week in a horse in Australia,” said Thomas Geisbert of Boston University, who works with the team that developed the treatment. “We have a monoclonal antibody that we have used in the lab.”

The U.S.-Australian research team reported about the antibody in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens in October (more at http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1000642). It was developed to work against the closely related Nipah virus.

Hendra and Nipah viruses are carried by a type of fruit bat commonly called flying foxes. Recent outbreaks have caused severe disease in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh and India. Hendra also infects horses. The viruses can cause brain swelling and acute respiratory illness.

The monoclonal antibody attaches to the virus and helps neutralize it. Until this week it had only been tested in animals, but kept them from becoming ill after they were infected with Nipah.

Geisbert and Australian media said the girl and her mother were not sick but had been in close contact with the horse.

“This was the little girl’s horse and it was pretty sick when they put it down,” Geisbert said. “We shipped the antibody via FedEx to Australia.”

The treatment is not licensed but in such emergency situations unapproved treatments may be used.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Blacksmith Brands Inc recalled on Friday four of its children’s cough and cold medicines made at a Johnson & Johnson plant which was temporarily closed after U.S. regulators found manufacturing lapses.

Late last month, J&J recalled 40 widely used nonprescription products for children and infants, such as Tylenol and Motrin, after Food and Drug Administration inspectors found filthy equipment and contaminated ingredients at the Pennsylvania factory.

The PediaCare products — Multi-Symptom Cold, Long Acting Cough, Decongestant and Allergy and Cold medicines — are sold exclusively in the United States, the FDA said on its website.

The recall was not initiated as a result of any consumer complaints or reports of adverse events, the agency said.

Blacksmith said it is advising consumers to discontinue use of the products and said stores should withdraw the products from their shelves and return them to the company.

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MIAMI (Reuters) – A large undersea cloud of dissolved hydrocarbons discovered last week near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill raises fresh questions about toxic chemicals used to fight the spill and their environmental impact.

David Hollander, a University of South Florida oceanographer, headed a research team that discovered the six-mile (10-km) wide “oil cloud” while on a government-funded expedition aboard the Weatherbird II, a vessel operated by the university’s College of Marine Science.

“We were collecting samples down to two miles (3 km) below the surface,” Hollander told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

“The plume or the cloud of dissolved hydrocarbons in the water was discovered northeast of the wellhead, about 35 kilometers (22 miles) to the northeast,” he said.

It was the second major deepwater plume discovered since the April 20 blowout at BP Plc’s Macondo well. Hollander said it was believed to stretch all the way from the wellhead to the site where it was first detected on Tuesday, in an area off the continental shelf south of Mobile, Alabama.

Hollander said scientists had yet to determine whether the dissolved hydrocarbons, found in oxygen-depleted waters, were the result of chemical dispersants used deep below the Gulf surface to break down oil from the leaking well.

But he said the contaminants — which could eventually be pushed onto the continental shelf before shifting slowly down toward the Florida Keys and possibly out to the open Atlantic Ocean — raised troubling questions about whether they would “cascade up the food web.”

The threat is that they will poison plankton and fish larvae before making their way into animals higher up the food chain, Hollander said.

INVISIBLE THREAT

The underwater contaminants are particularly “insidious” because they are invisible, Hollander said, adding that they were suspended in what looked like normal seawater.

“It may be due to the application of the dispersants that a portion of the petroleum has extracted itself away from the crude and is now incorporated into the waters with solvents and detergents,” he added.

“We think there could be both short-term and long-term implications … There’s a lot of unchartered territory that we’re moving into with this oil spill,” said Hollander.

He said dispersants, a cocktail of organic solvents and detergents, had never been used at the depth of BP’s well before, and no one really knows how they interact physically and chemically under pressure with oil, water and gases.

“On the surface they’re very readily or actively used and their behavior is well understood. That’s not the case at all with their use in the subsurface and especially at a mile (1.6 km) deep,” Hollander said.

“A very-large-scale experiment is being conducted and we don’t know the implications of it,” he added.

Hollander said the amount of suspected dispersants in the cloud of hydrocarbons was likely to be known after about two weeks of further testing.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funded the mission aboard the Weatherbird II along with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Service, Hollander said.

He said NOAA had dispatched a vessel on Thursday to probe the same subsurface plume discovered by his team.

In a statement issued on Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the underwater use of dispersants appeared to have been effective so far in breaking up oil from the BP spill and did not seem to have had any significant impact on aquatic life.

“EPA and the U.S. Coast Guard are taking steps that could reduce the volume of dispersants applied in the Gulf. While we do know dispersants are less toxic and shorter-lived than the oil, much remains unknown about their impact on the environment when used in these unprecedented volumes,” the statement said.

Roughly 850,000 gallons (3.2 million litres) of dispersant had been used to combat the Gulf spill as of Thursday, including 150,000 gallons (570,000 litres) released below sea level.

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