Word: avian
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...Hong Kong, why he had waited until now to tell her about the virus. He suspected that the H5 had not really come from human patients but was the result of laboratory contamination. Everyone knew that her lab was situated close to Shortridge's and that Shortridge worked with avian viruses. Moreover, this was Hong Kong, where poultry stalls with live chickens could be found in the same neighborhoods as five-star hotels. "I think he came to Hong Kong to have a look-see if it was a sloppy laboratory," says Lim. She knew his concern was justified...
...Webster, it was an exciting moment. "The situation in Hong Kong is what I've been predicting throughout my career," he says. For years, he contends, people have dismissed avian flu "as a problem of chickens--who cares?" He revels in his newfound credibility. "Finally," he says, laughing, "at the end of my career, the chickens have come home to roost...
...anyone who knew influenza, the news instantly raised the specter of 1918. Or worse, as this was a purely avian virus against which most humans would have no defense. The world, moreover, was far more densely populated, and high-speed travel now linked all the major cities. In 1918, when transportation was still painfully slow, the pandemic circled the globe in a matter of months. Traveling by jet, a new killer virus could reach Tokyo in three hours and New York City within...
...kept alive at various culture repositories ever since. Their findings suggest that the 1918 virus came to people from pigs, not from birds--although Taubenberger cites studies by Webster and others indicating that human viruses and the pig flu of the 1930s may share a common avian ancestor. This suggests that sometime before 1918, a bird virus could have entered the mammalian population and, through reassortment, produced the pathogenic flu virus known...
Hong Kong, in the meantime, had begun to relax. From August into November, nothing happened. No new cases appeared. In postmortems on the first case, researchers congratulated themselves on how well the global flu-surveillance system had worked. Some even suggested that it worked too well, that the avian flu had been discovered only because the surveillance network was looking for such events and that isolated bird-to-human infections had probably happened before and gone undetected...