Word: h5n1
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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...
...were health authorities, who initially feared that the Nguyen family cluster meant the H5N1 virus?which usually only spreads from bird to human in isolated cases?might now be moving from person to person. Since the disease first began jumping from birds to people in 1997, scientists have been worried that the lethal virus could mutate to gain the ability to transmit from one person to another as easily as a normal human-flu virus. That would open the door for a global influenza pandemic that could kill millions...
...poultry populations in almost half of the country's 64 provinces. Most worrisome of all, the increased poultry sales and mass travel that mark the coming Tet Lunar New Year festival (beginning Feb. 9) are the perfect ingredients for an explosive rise in infections?and every infection gives the H5N1 virus the opportunity to further adapt to humans. "If something is going to cook, Tet is when it's going to happen," says Dr. Robert Webster, an avian-flu expert at the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis...
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...
...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...