Word: avian
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...killer had come and gone, raising new mysteries even as old mysteries from 1918 were being solved. What allowed this avian virus to cross the species barrier and set up killing infections in man? Why did it strike the young and hardy with the most ferocity--just as the 1918 virus had? And, most important, has the virus really ceased to be a threat, or is it circulating more quietly, primed for a "reassortment event" that will set off the next global disaster...
Webster and Shortridge are convinced that the avian virus is still circulating in the environment. "I don't think we're out of the woods yet," says Shortridge. Fukuda agrees: "You would be a fool to predict what the virus is going to do next. I'm equally prepared for this thing to disappear as I am to hear one day when I walk into the office, 'Oh, did you hear? There's another 10 cases--or 100 cases...
...Webster, it was a striking moment--the first time he had ever been invited to the meeting, a point he made clear in the opening moments of his talk. Equally striking, no one on the panel tried to minimize the potential danger of the new avian virus. Far from it. In a vote the FDA had not even requested, the committee unanimously agreed to move ahead to develop a vaccine against H5, even take it through clinical trials...
Shortridge and Webster immediately recognized the gravity of the chicken-flu outbreak in Hong Kong, at least for the region's chicken industry. They knew that while avian influenza did not ordinarily make its host sick, a benign virus could reassort to produce a pathogen of almost inconceivable lethality. Webster's Memphis lab had observed such a transformation in the wild on two occasions, the first in April 1983, when a relatively mild influenza struck chickens on the vast chicken farms of Pennsylvania. The birds got visibly sick, some died and egg production fell, but overall the outbreak remained only...
...addition to cancer care and kidneytransplants, Angell has over 15 areas ofspecialization, including ophthalmology, emergencycare, avian medicine and even plastic surgery...