Word: avian
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...level. Yet the ill will engendered among local Guangdong officials might make them less eager to collaborate with the WHO the next time a possible case appears. The importance of maintaining this relationship in Guangdong goes beyond SARS to include other agents that might cross the species barrier?possibly avian influenza or some other novel zoonotic disease. Local officials and the WHO have to maintain a warm dialogue. The world's health depends...
...article criticizing China's congress. The department also forbade coverage of other sensitive topics, including Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who exposed the government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic; separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang; the financial scandal swirling around Shanghai tycoon Zhou Zhengyi, and avian flu, which has broken out twice in China in the past five years and can kill humans...
...Hong Kong's "bird flu" was a virus that was part human, part avian. Much luck, hard scientific labor and prompt containment measures prevented that outbreak from turning into a global catastrophe. Next time we might not be so fortunate. Medical records dating back to the 18th century show waves of influenza rolling westward from Asia through Russia into Europe with disturbing regularity. Three or four times a century, a pandemic spreads from flu's heartland. So statistically speaking, since the last reassorted strain emerged in Hong Kong in 1968, we're due for another...
...Some question why Hong Kong, with its sophisticated medical infrastructure and experience with similar outbreaks?the city effectively contained a deadly avian-flu epidemic in 1997?was caught off guard. Local radio talk-show host Albert Cheng puts it bluntly: "The government wanted to show the foreign press that Hong Kong is not in crisis and that everything is under control...
...Speed and accurate information are critical in defeating such outbreaks, and critics say Beijing's silence has had deadly consequences. In 1997, when a previously unknown strain of avian influenza killed nine in Hong Kong, the government's swift move to quarantine patients and cull more than a million chickens was widely credited with halting the spread of the disease. The risks of an uncontrolled viral outbreak are catastrophically high: with its tens of millions of pigs, poultry and people living in close proximity, southern China has long been one of the world's most lethal breeding grounds for killer...