Word: flu
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...Flu season is still about a month away, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) wants Americans to get vaccinated now. There's no cure for the influenza virus, which in its worldwide perambulations can mutate from a simple runny nose-and-sore-throat to a fatal illness. Each year, 36,000 Americans die from the flu, but thanks to National Influenza Vaccination Week and a record number of available doses, maybe this year will be better...
...flu shot is the only vaccination that is continually updated, because influenza is a rare type of virus that is constantly changing. There are three types of the flu - Influenza A, B and C - each one with its own viral strain that replicates and changes independently from the other types. Seasonal strains of human influenza change constantly, which is why people can catch the flu multiple times. (See the Year in Health, from...
...World War I and warring nations worried that the enemy might use the virus to its advantage, so most news reports of the outbreak were censored. Spain remained neutral during the war, and its accounts of the virus's horrific symptoms caused the illness to be nicknamed the "Spanish flu," even though scientists now believe it originated in the United States...
...This wasn't like normal flu," says Frank Snowden, Yale University's chair of the history of science and medicine department. "Physicians were horrified by what they saw. People's lungs filled with this terrible frothy fluid. They were literally choking to death. It was ghastly." Symptoms appeared so suddenly that victims sometimes died within just one day. The flu hit World War I soldiers especially hard; some historians believe more soldiers died from the flu than from...
Asia has been plagued by periodic bird flu outbreaks among its poultry population since the mid-1990s, the largest outbreak occurring in 1997 when eighteen people in Hong Kong came down with the virus. Outbreaks also occurred in 2001 and 2002, leading to the culling and destruction of millions of possibly-infected fowl. By 2003, the strain had spread to much of Asia's bird population. "It remains a serious pandemic threat," says Bridges. "It has a 100% mortality rate among poultry, but so far we are not seeing the type of molecular changes required to jump to humans...