Word: h5n1
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...comfort food. Although they had heard that the avian influenza that swept Southeast Asia last year had returned, they thought the disease was confined to the south. The day after the funeral, Viet fell sick with flulike symptoms. He was hospitalized on Dec. 31, and tested negative for the H5N1 virus that causes avian flu. Viet deteriorated rapidly and died on Jan. 9. The next day, his younger brother Nguyen Thanh Hung, who had taken care of Viet in the hospital, became ill. When Thanh Hung's blood test came back positive for H5N1, doctors retested Viet's blood...
With 44 people infected and 32 dead from the avian flu, it wasn't a good year to spend time near ducks or chickens, particularly in Southeast Asia. Millions of fowl were culled in Thailand and Vietnam, which bore the brunt of this year's outbreak of H5N1 influenza, as fear of a widespread epidemic mounted. Public-health officials were particularly alarmed when the virus showed up in tigers, leopards and pigs, mammals that often serve as influenza bridges from animal reservoirs to humans. And in Thailand scientists identified one case of what they fear was human-to-human transmission...
...defend us against that fate? Far too little. Work on the one tool that can make the biggest difference in the severity of a pandemic-an effective vaccine-has been underfunded. Thanks to a new technique called reverse genetics, researchers were able to create a vaccine strain from the H5N1 virus in record time-yet the candidate vaccine is just now entering clinical trials, because drug companies have been loathe to invest in a vaccine that may never be used, and governments have been reluctant to fully fund the work. The vaccine won't be ready for five...
...bird-flu vaccine and antiviral drugs-and allow the WHO to channel some of those supplies to countries that can't afford them. In the long run, Asia's age-old backyard-farming practices-whereby animals and human beings live in close proximity, giving rise to new viruses like H5N1-need to be moved toward modern methods of slaughtering and food preparation. That will take resources that nations like Vietnam don't have, so again, those funds need to come from developed countries. In turn, Asian countries need to be fully open and cooperative about allowing disease surveillance and scientific...
...such a mutation could happen in the future?and the deaths in northwest Thailand demonstrate how unprepared Asia is for an unchecked outbreak. Most nations in the region have minimal stocks of antiviral drugs and no pandemic action plan. H5N1 vaccine, still in development, would not arrive in time to make a difference. If a pandemic occurred tomorrow, says Stohr, Asia would be "playing it by ear," politically improvising even as the death toll rose. "One of the most difficult things to explain to the public after a pandemic would be why we weren't prepared, because there have been...