Word: flu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year-old woman developed a fever, sore throat and cough, and complained of dizziness. Five days later, she was in the intensive-care unit on a respirator with a confirmed case of H5 influenza. On Dec. 7, a five year-old girl began vomiting and developed other flu symptoms. H5 again. On Dec. 12, another child, a cousin of the five-year-old, came down with a fever and was hospitalized with H5. And a new outbreak of H5 had turned up on a fourth chicken farm in the New Territories...
...virus has shown no evidence of reassortment. The fact that the outbreak happened in December, before Hong Kong's regular flu season, reduced opportunities for reassortment, as did the prompt slaughter of the chickens. But the flu season is coming. It will peak in late February and early March, with a second peak this summer. What researchers fear most is that someone infected with a common flu strain will also become infected with H5, and thus become an inadvertent mixing chamber for the production of a wholly new virus...
...would be easy to dismiss the Hong Kong Incident as just a one-time quirk of blood and protein. But the U.S.'s leading flu experts seem unwilling to do so. This became particularly apparent at the annual meeting of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Panel, convened two weeks ago in Bethesda, Md., to decide what flu strains should be targeted for next year's flu vaccine. Ordinarily these meetings are routine, if not downright boring. But this year the committee devoted half the day to the Hong Kong outbreak...
...success of the surveillance network, it also showed how dangerously mutable influenza viruses can be and that, in their most sinister forms, they can be as deadly as any other disease known to man, more akin to Ebola than to the fevers and aches most people associate with flu. Virologists say the decision to kill all the chickens in Hong Kong--widely derided at the time--was in fact the smartest thing that could be done and that it might have prevented a more widespread disaster. "The question is," says Robert Webster, chairman of the virology department at St. Jude...
...Hong Kong Incident, as Webster calls it, arrived with cinematic timing--an almost supernatural confluence of event and inquiry. It occurred amid heightened sensitivity to the dangers of newly emerging viruses and just as several teams of researchers were closing in on the mysterious 1918 "Spanish flu," which killed more than 20 million people. At the same time, it turns out, public-health officials were quietly intensifying plans for the next great global epidemic, or pandemic...