Word: flu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bird flu, it seems, is back. Last month's five deaths - one of the highest tallies of bird-flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month - were in locations as far removed from one another as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east. "From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable, as is the wide geographic spread," says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated...
...thing is certain about avian influenza: it's deadly. All three people who contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus in China last year died. In the first six weeks of 2009, eight people have come down with bird flu, and five have died. Another thing is that while the disease has yet to go pandemic, as many doctors fear it could, it remains worrisomely persistent. Every year since 2003, about 100 people in Asia, the Middle East and Africa contract the disease. Last year, in a rare exception, the number dropped below...
...authorities in the far-Western region of Xinjiang culled more than 13,000 chickens in the city of Hotan after 519 died in a bird-flu outbreak. But until this week, China had reported no widespread outbreaks of the virus among bird populations, prompting concerns among some public-health experts that mainland health and veterinary authorities could be missing - or even concealing - the spread of the disease through poultry and wild birds. Hong Kong, where the first human cases of H5N1 infection were found in 1997, reported finding a dozen birds with the deadly strain of the virus earlier this...
...firm presence of the virus on the mainland. Some experts worry that China could be missing the disease's deadly progression. Last week Dr. Lo Wing-Lok, an adviser to the Hong Kong government on communicable diseases, said the mainland had not been forthright about the spread of bird flu in poultry. "There's no doubt of an outbreak of bird flu in China, though the government hasn't admitted it," he told Bloomberg. Yu Kangzhen, the Ministry of Agriculture's chief veterinarian, responded in an interview with the state-run Xinhua news service that human bird-flu cases...
Paradoxical, maybe, but effective. Consider Amica Mutual Insurance, based in Rhode Island. Amica seemed to be doing everything right: it boasts an on-site fitness center at its headquarters. It pays toward Weight Watchers and smoking-cessation help, gives gift cards to reward proper prenatal care and offers free flu shots each year. Still, in the mid-2000s, about 7% of the company's insured population, including roughly 3,100 employees and their dependents, had diabetes. "We manage risk. That's our core business," says Scott Boyd, Amica's director of compensation and benefits. But diabetes-related claims from Amica...