Word: amoy
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...maybe a trip through the Yangtze Gorges. Yet the country has a great deal more to offer - to history buffs, adventure seekers and beach bums alike. For an alternative take on the Middle Kingdom, try these three little-known but easily accessible destinations: XIAMEN Once known as Amoy, this coastal city in Fujian province is one of the few places in China to preserve the legacy of colonialism. It was one of China's first treaty ports - the centers for international trade set up by Europeans in the aftermath of the Opium War in 1842. Xiamen's sleepy Gulangyu Island...
...another open question is precisely how the disease spreads. Doctors first concluded that the agent responsible for SARS is transmitted by droplets expelled by coughs or sneezes. After the burst of cases in Hong Kong's Amoy Gardens complex and the particularly aggressive spread of SARS in Toronto among health-care workers, however, scientists now speculate that there may be other mechanisms as well. In Amoy Gardens, for example, transmission may have occurred via contaminated fecal matter leaking from a broken sewage pipe. That would explain the lack of direct contact, as well as the fact that all these cases...
...fluctuating toll may be partly due to regional statistical idiosyncrasies. In Hong Kong, for example, many of the recent fatalities were residents of Amoy Gardens, an apartment complex where at the end of March more than 200 people contracted SARS in a matter of days?producing a logjam of critically ill patients who are now beginning to die, as it takes several weeks for SARS to claim its victims. More unsettling are reports from several laboratories that the coronavirus responsible is mutating almost continuously as it spreads, raising the possibility that certain strains may be more vicious than others...
...Fortunately, at the moment there's little evidence to suggest the disease has shifted gears and spreading more rapidly than before. In fact, absent the kind of environmental factors that facilitate large-scale outbreaks like Amoy Gardens' where one superspreader is believed to have discharged a large viral load into the complex's dodgy plumbing system, SARS doesn't seem to be as contagious as first feared. On average, say epidemiologists, each sufferer infects only two people, compared with 16 victims for a person with measles...
...should be frightened of SARS. The Hong Konger caught the disease in the devastating Amoy Gardens outbreak, and he was only discharged from the hospital on April 24. The nature of the virus is still so mysterious that nobody even knows whether or not a recovered patient like Ma can be reinfected. But with the disease on the wane in Hong Kong, SARS no longer seems so terrifying to him. While Ma says he'll "still be careful and maintain personal hygiene," he's already given up wearing a surgical mask...