Word: h5n1
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sent home, and then returned to Bangkok. Less than two weeks later, Pranee died of bird flu, the country's 10th confirmed victim of the disease?but one with a major distinction. On Sept. 28, a joint World Health Organization (WHO) and Thai investigation announced what scientists studying the H5N1 bird-flu virus had long feared: Pranee hadn't contracted the disease from chickens. She had almost certainly caught it in the hospital while nursing her dying daughter. Human-to-human transmission of the virus was possible...
...avian flu's deadly H5N1 strain claimed its 20th victim in Vietnam? The Vietnamese government doesn't appear particularly eager to know. Officially, the government says it is waiting for the last in a series of tests to confirm that a 14-month-old boy died Sept. 5 of H5N1 bird flu. Yet one Vietnamese health official told TIME the real cause for the delay is the desire to avoid a fresh bird-flu controversy before an Asian-European summit in Hanoi next month. "For the time being, we are just identifying it as flu type...
...Outbreaks surfaced last week in Malaysia and again in Thailand, where an 18-year-old became the country's ninth person to die from the virus. News on the research front has been worrying, too. Recent experiments in the Netherlands have shown that cats can carry and spread the H5N1 virus, while South Korean scientists have linked their outbreak this past winter to migratory ducks. Such ducks have a natural resistance to the flu, so they can potentially spread the virus over wide areas without showing symptoms. "This may explain why the virus has reappeared in divergent areas of Thailand...
...research studies warn, however, that widespread human infection may be only a matter of time. A report published in Nature last week by scientists at the University of Hong Kong and Shantou University shows that the H5N1 virus has evolved rapidly since it first infected humans in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six. The result was the powerful strain of H5N1 that caused this winter's unusually widespread and lethal outbreak. Another recent study shows that the latest strains of the virus proved the most deadly to lab mice-raising worries that H5N1 is also becoming increasingly dangerous to humans...
...real fear is that H5N1 could crossbreed with a standard human-flu virus to create a highly lethal, highly contagious strain with the potential to cause a global flu pandemic. Professor Yi Guan of the University of Hong Kong, the lead researcher on the Nature paper, worries that H5N1 is evolving so fast that it may gain the ability to infect humans by mutating on its own, without mixing with a human virus, much as SARS did. Yi says the latest outbreaks show that the virus has become endemic to the region, with a difficult-to-eradicate foothold in migratory...