Word: birding
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...current H5N1 flu, unlike common flu, strikes deep within a patient's lungs, making it harder to spread to someone else and unusually lethal. Dr. Nguyen Hong Ha of Hanoi's Bach Mai Hospital has probably treated more cases than anyone else. Two-thirds of the deaths from bird flu since 2003 have occurred in Vietnam. Ha has watched the virus ravage the lungs of healthy young patients in a matter of days. He says the key to treatment is applying just the right amount of breathing assistance. Too much, and an H5N1 patient's weakened lungs could burst...
...best course of action is not to treat this sort of flu but to prevent it. Preliminary results, released in August, of an experimental vaccine against bird flu suggest that a high-dose vaccine given in two shots a month apart would yield the best response. "What is sobering is how much was required, which puts an added pressure on vaccine production," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases...
There are troubling signs, however, that H5N1 is on the move. The virus killed thousands of wild geese in China this past spring and popped up among migratory birds in parts of Siberia this summer. There was a report in May about a handful of infected pigs in western Java. Even more worrisome, Indonesian health authorities said last week that a number of chickens on household farms in Jakarta had been testing positive for H5N1 without showing signs of illness. If confirmed, that development could severely complicate efforts to track and control bird flu in poultry. Without dead chickens...
...tests on samples taken from two of the most recent human victims of bird flu show no cause for immediate alarm. "There are no obvious changes in the virus that we tested," says Dr. Guan Yi, an avian-flu expert at the University of Hong Kong who has helped sound the pandemic alarm. For now, he says, there's "nothing new. Nothing to worry about." The viral genes are still the same avian-flu genes that haven't figured out how to spread easily from one person to another...
...Indonesia, these attacks come at a vulnerable moment. Authorities are still struggling to control a potentially disastrous outbreak of bird flu that has left six dead in recent months. And on the same day as last week's bombings, Yudhoyono announced drastic fuel-price hikes designed to shore up the government's shaky finances by slashing billions of dollars in subsidies. With Bali accounting for more than half of Indonesia's vital tourism revenues, the likely exodus of visitors from the island will place further pressure on the country's economy...