Word: h5n1
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Moreover, Dhanin says CP began warning Thai farmers about the possibility of avian flu in November. That's when company officials showed him a newspaper photo of birds dying in central Thailand. Dhanin says he had no idea it was the deadly H5N1 virus, but he knew he had to act. Orders went out to seal up all of CP's chicken plants by further restricting access to plant premises--even delivery trucks were kept out. On Jan. 23, government officials announced that two young boys had tested positive for avian flu. The next day, CP's stock plummeted...
Health officials have long been worried that the next deadly global epidemic--a slate wiper, as epidemiologists call it--would be a new kind of deadly flu to which humans have no resistance. And since the 1960s, their fears have been focused on the H5N1 virus, a bird pathogen that is generally harmless in its host species (ducks and other wildfowl) but extremely deadly when contracted by chickens. It was H5N1 that struck Hong Kong in 1997, where it went straight from chickens to humans. Authorities quickly killed 1.4 million birds, and although six people died, the disease never managed...
What scares scientists most about H5N1 is that someone eventually will be stricken by the bird flu and a human flu at the same time, allowing the viruses to swap genetic material. The resulting hybrid could be both deadly and virulent. Even if it weren't immediately contagious, it could quickly evolve. A study published last week in the journal Science reported that the SARS virus mutated in a matter of months from a form that could infect only 3% of people who came in contact with it to one that infected 70%. Once it mutated, SARS quickly spread around...
...geese are spreading it through their droppings. "Did birds in Hong Kong, which nest in Siberia and North Korea, somehow spread the virus elsewhere?" asks Robert Webster, an expert in animal influenzas at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. "That's a frightening possibility." If H5N1 does evolve into a flu that humans can spread, a vaccine could be developed but would take months. "Once you know this virus can spread from human to human, region to region," says Dr. Yi Guan, a SARS and avian-flu expert at the University of Hong Kong, "it's already...
...current virus sweeping Asia keeps mutating and appears resistant to these cheaper drugs. It's believed that pricier drugs such as Tamiflu will prove more effective, but supplies are limited. Meanwhile, it may take at least six months to produce a vaccine that's effective against H5N1...