Word: curtails
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...effort to curtail the current avian-flu outbreak before any killer mutations can occur, public-health officials, epidemiologists and virologists are now scrambling to figure out the origin and genomic sequence of the flu strains in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam. A 14-strong WHO team, including experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is expected to arrive in Hanoi by midweek. If they can determine where this virus came from, then perhaps better surveillance and monitoring of the poultry trade can curtail future outbreaks...
...recorded history, no disease has jumped the species barrier to infect humans, caused an epidemic and then never threatened us again--not without the discovery of a vaccine or cure to curtail the microbe. Some diseases, such as chicken pox, gradually become endemic to man and eventually result, if we are lucky, in nothing more than a mild childhood illness. Others, such as Ebola, retreat back to whatever animal reservoir they came from, stalking humanity from their hidden lair, only occasionally lashing out to bloody a village or crash a rural hospital. But diseases do not, as a rule, just...
...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 among humans. But as long as there were no new cases then perhaps Yi had time to fast-track his paper and get it published...
Officials at the Guangdong CDC, while confident that culling the civets was necessary, are not totally convinced that it will curtail an outbreak. They have ordered a further extermination of rats--a much more elusive target--because of evidence that they carry a similar virus. Dr. Rob Breiman, an epidemiologist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is leading the WHO team currently tracing the origins of last year's epidemic in Guangdong. Breiman observes, "Everyone certainly thinks this is meaningful. But where is the civet cat in the chain? Are they getting it from another animal...
McDonald's, the world's largest fast-food chain, said that by the end of 2004 it would stop using meat from animals that had been excessively treated with antibiotics. The decision may help curtail the practice of dosing healthy animals with antibiotics to plump them up for slaughter. Doctors hope this will reduce the opportunity for disease-causing bacteria, present in meat, to become resistant to drugs...