Word: birding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most of the world has heard of the "bird flu" that emerged in Hong Kong last year, infecting 18 people and killing six. One patient, a young woman, remains on a ventilator under intensive care. Although no new cases have been discovered since Dec. 28, virologists consider the emergence of this new virus one of the most significant and worrisome medical events of the day. And they don't think the danger has passed. In fact, the critical period could just now be arriving in Hong Kong. This is the start of the traditional flu season, when the new virus...
...gene known as H5--one that is notoriously lethal to chickens. Shortridge did briefly wonder if the virus might eventually cause problems for humans. In an earlier study, conducted with great discretion, his lab had found that residents of rural Hong Kong had antibodies to all the known bird-flu viruses. What that suggested, says Shortridge, was that "any virus could cross the species barrier to humans. But whether it could set up an infection, be established as an infection and maintained as an infection is, of course, another matter...
...virus identified during the past 80 years. The closest known strain was Swine Iowa 30--the pig flu isolated by Richard Shope in 1930 and 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...
...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...
...need a T-Bird or an "I Like Ike" button to enjoy that classic American institution of the fifties: the drugstore soda fountain. According to local fountain proprietor Phylis E. Madanian, you can find one of only three operating Massachusetts soda fountains around the corner from the Square on Brattle Street...