Word: civets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...been taking the old Kowloon-Canton Railway up to Shenzhen and Guangzhou to carry out his fieldwork. It was Yi, along with the Shenzhen Centers for Disease Control (CDC), who in May took samples from Shenzhen's Dongmen Market and made the discovery that the masked palm civet, as well as the raccoon dog and hog badger, carried a virus remarkably similar to the coronavirus that causes SARS. That research, initially hailed as a breakthrough in establishing the zoonotic origins of SARS, resulted in the Guangdong government temporarily shutting down the wildlife markets and banning the sale of civets...
...Instead, subsequent research by a mainland Chinese team challenged Yi's research, finding no evidence of the SARS coronavirus in civets. Meanwhile, other scientists murmured that Yi's data was based on too narrow a range of samples drawn from just one market. Perhaps those civets, some argued, had been infected by humans in that market, rather than the other way around. For Yi, a hot-tempered, chain-smoking workaholic, this was an unbearable impugning not just of his research but also his genuine desire to apply his science to public health. Even more worrying was the Chinese government...
...When he brought those samples back to Hong Kong, a frightening picture started to emerge. Not only was he again finding the SARS coronavirus in a host of rodent species?in addition to the civet cat, he also detected the virus in hog badgers, Eurasian badgers, raccoon badgers and ferret badgers?he was astonished, when he did the genomic sequencing, to observe that these coronaviruses had actually mutated to become more similar to the SARS coronavirus samples taken from humans during the first outbreak last spring. All this confirmed that the disease that had infected humans was again at large...
...Vigilance is essential. Medical researchers say there is a good chance SARS is laying in wait and could resurface during winter months. One reason: civet cats and other wild animals that tested positive for the virus and could be its original source are still on sale in Chinese markets. The virus could also be inadvertently released in a lab accident, as may have happened in Singapore. Dr. Henry L. Niman, a bioengineer at Harvard University, suggests that even now the virus could be spreading undetected through people who carry it without developing symptoms, only to become deadly again during...
...reservoir in which the coronavirus that causes SARS can thrive and mutate. Equally alarming, the list of animal hosts also increased last week as researchers in China's Guangdong province, believed to be the origin of the epidemic, reported that a wide variety of wild animals?in addition to civet cats and raccoon dogs?now seem to carry a close version of the virus, which could jump to humans...