Word: infectivity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...warnings about bird flu have been growing scarier in the past few days. In a speech last Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt advised folks to stock up on tuna fish and powdered milk in case the bird flu virus mutates into a form that could easily infect people. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns recently told reporters, "It would be almost biblical to think we would be protected." Then there was Robert Webster, the noted flu virologist from St. Jude Children's Research Center, who said on national television Tuesday night that he had a three-month supply...
...that hard lesson, having faced outbreaks of other avian flus as recently as 2002 and 2004. H5N1 is only one of more than 100 subtypes of the influenza A virus. The majority of the subtypes are found in birds. A few, such as H3N2 and H1N1, have adapted to infect humans. The 2002 avian outbreak, which struck in Virginia, was the H7N2 subtype, and it illustrated the importance of early detection. "The outbreak was not contained in time and spread to 200 farms up and down the Shenandoah Valley," says Lobb...
...avian flu is spreading far faster than the disease. Watch enough reports on television about the outbreaks in Turkey, and you could worry yourself sick. In my opinion, the anxiety is unfounded. ? At the moment, the H5N1 influenza virus is mainly a threat to birds. The virus can infect and kill other animals but only if they have close contact with infected birds. The big concern is that it will gain the ability to pass easily from person to person, possibly by exchanging genes with an ordinary flu virus in the body of some unlucky person infected with both...
...inability to accommodate all students. Seidel went to UHS but was turned away when he was told he was not sick enough to be admitted to the already full hospital. He said the University should have alternatives so as not to turn ill students away, allowing them to potentially infect others. Wernli also mentioned rumors that part of the reason the virus spread so rapidly was because of vomit and diarrhea in some of the Cabot tunnels that was not immediately cleaned away. However, now that the spread of the virus has been slowed and most of the students have...
...speed things up is to toss out the eggs and grow the viruses in human cells. Any virus that can infect humans will, by definition, grow easily in human-cell cultures, so that step could cut the incubation time to three months. Chiron, one of the world's leading manufacturers of the egg-dependent flu vaccine, is testing its first cell-culture technique, which it plans to apply to seasonal and pandemic flu vaccines. The Department of Health and Human Services last spring awarded a $97 million contract to Sanofi-Aventis, a Paris-based drug company, to develop avian...