Word: civets
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...past two weeks, with two new cases in China's Guangdong province and suspected cases turning up in Manila and Hong Kong, it seems that severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is re-emerging too. The brutal culling of masked palm civets from Guangdong wildlife markets and farms that commenced last week has only exacerbated the sense that matters had been spiraling out of control. Forestry officials incinerated some civets, boiled others to death and drowned still more in disinfectant. Also called a civet cat, the small, furry mammal with big innocent-looking eyes is unrelated to real cats, being more...
...professor at the University of Hong Kong, has traveled by rail up to Shenzhen and Guangzhou to carry out fieldwork. It was Yi, along with the Shenzhen Centers for Disease Control, 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 SARS coronavirus. That research, initially hailed as a breakthrough in establishing the zoonotic origins of SARS, resulted in the Guangdong government temporarily banning the sale of civets. For Yi this should have been...
Instead, subsequent research by a mainland Chinese team challenged Yi's research, finding no evidence of the 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 of his genuine desire to apply his science to public health. Even more worrying was China's decision...
When Yi 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 animals--the civet cat, as well as various types of badger--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 outbreak one year ago. All this confirmed that the disease that had infected humans was again at large. The animals that showed the highest infection rate by far were...
...late December, Yi was sitting in his apartment in Hong Kong, smoking and wondering about his way forward. It was only a matter of time before another outbreak would occur, he now believed. There was simply too much interaction between humans and civets for this virus not to make the leap. But it could take months to get a paper peer-reviewed and published so it would impact public health by encouraging the Guangdong government to curtail the civet population--or at least limit contact between humans and the animal. In that time, the disease could again gain a foothold...