Word: among
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contains human, avian and swine flu genes, and genetic analysis indicates that it reassorted years ago, meaning it could have been in pig populations for some time before the virus gained the ability to transmit easily from person to person. If we had had tight surveillance of flu infections among swine, we might have noticed that something bad was brewing. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine...
...unlike diseases like foot and mouth, swine flu is not an infection that is automatically reported to national health authorities. Flu is common among pigs but not much more deadly than it usually is among people. (The H5N1 bird flu virus, by comparison, destroys poultry populations.) That means that flu infections in swine herds can easily fall under the radar, as seems to have been the case with the new H1N1. Though there were sporadic reports of flu infections passing from pigs to people over the past few years, "we hadn't seen anything that tipped us off that this...
...from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health and the Mexican government is now beginning an investigation in Mexico, taking blood samples and swabbing the inside of pigs' nostrils, looking for H1N1 infection. The hope is to find out how prevalent the virus is among Mexican pigs - if at all - and begin to trace back the virus...
...easy. It took years to find the original animal sources of SARS and HIV, among other new diseases. What makes tracking emerging viruses inside wildlife populations all the more difficult is that animals - even more than people - move around a lot, across borders. The U.S. imports live pigs from Europe, while Mexico takes in some 600,000 pigs a year from the U.S., so it's entirely possible that the virus began in Europe (the H1N1 virus has Eurasian genes), then moved to America and Mexico with pigs before infecting the first human. "It's going to take several weeks...
...veterinarians are looking out for new diseases in livestock and wildlife in the same way that the WHO's global flu network is constantly monitoring the world's human population for new influenza strains. As we've seen with H1N1, once a new flu has emerged and begun spreading among people, it's likely too late to contain. "What we need to do is upstream surveillance in animals and wildlife," says William Karesh, vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Global Health Program. "We've begun to do that with avian flu, but the funding isn't available...