Word: borderer
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Several countries tightened border controls and discouraged travel to affected areas - Cuba suspended all flights to and from Mexico - but the World Health Organization kept the pandemic alert level at Phase 4, still two phases below a full pandemic. Outside Mexico, the apparent epicenter of the A/H1N1 virus, there have been no deaths confirmed from the flu and relatively few hospitalizations, and health officials continued to preach the need for a calm response. "What we see in the United States, or have been seeing so far, has been milder," said Richard Besser, the acting director for the Centers for Disease...
...also possible that A/H1N1 began life in Mexico especially virulent - that country has apparently been grappling with the virus for weeks longer than the U.S. has - and evolved to become less dangerous by the time it crossed the border. That would not be an unusual evolutionary device, since viruses that are too deadly cannot survive if they kill off their host before being given a chance to spread. "It's fairly common in epidemics to see a trade-off between the ability to cause severe death and transmissibility," says Steven Kleiboeker, a virologist and the chief scientific officer for ViraCor...
...With hordes of undergrads returning from spring-break trips across the border, campus health staffers are planning for the worst. By canceling summer programs in Mexico and stockpiling supplies, they're trying to stop outbreaks before they start - and at the same time attempting to reassure jittery students. At Columbia University in New York City - where a graduate student on Sunday received a diagnosis of Type A influenza, which has been linked to swine flu - the assistant vice president for health services, Dr. Samuel Seward, sent an e-mail to students urging them to cover their mouths when they sneeze...
...more problematic. Strains of avian flu, like the much-feared H5N1, can infect individual humans, but they can't make the person-to-person leap. Avian flu that is passed through the pig's mammalian system, however, can be passed readily among humans. (Read "Why Border Controls Can't Keep Out the Flu Virus...
Davis quickly proved himself to be a centrist Democrat - voting, for instance, for a 2006 bill to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, a measure that divided Democrats. The previous year, he followed his party in supporting a bill to halt restrictions on federal spending on embryonic stem cell research. He also showed an independent streak: Even as much of Alabama's Democratic establishment, including its black caucus, backed then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in the state's Democratic presidential primary, Davis endorsed Obama. (Obama won.) In the days after Obama's victory last November, there was talk that...