Word: infectivity
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TRANSMISSION Birds are prime reservoirs of West Nile virus and prime targets of mosquitoes. When a mosquito bites an infected bird like a crow, the virus collects in the insect's saliva and can infect the next target it strikes. The disease may take 3 to 14 days to incubate...
...team of Chinese microbiologists last week confirmed that the civet could indeed produce a unique effect on the human body: it might cause SARS. They've also extracted the virus from a species of wild dog and found antibodies?evidence of an earlier infection?in a Chinese badger. Those results probably confirm the long-dreaded notion that overly close cohabitation of man and animal is brewing up new, fatal plagues. Hong Kong's bird flu of 1997 was just such a creation: a virus harmless in waterfowl that jumped species to infect chickens and then mutated again, killing six people...
...SARS coronavirus is the 14th known member of a family of viruses named for their distinctive, crown-like shape. Eleven exist in animals?dogs, cats, rats, mice, pigs, cows, rabbits and turkeys?and two infect the human race, in which they produce that most familiar of all ailments: the common cold. Scientists, who have long suspected that humans were originally infected with common-cold coronaviruses by contact with an unknown animal many centuries ago, had already posited a possible animal connection in the current outbreak. The fact that many of the initial victims in China's southern province of Guangdong...
...strikingly similar to the SARS agent. The scientists sequenced its genome and found the two viruses to be nearly identical. The World Health Organization points out that the results don't definitively prove that civets or other animals gave humans SARS. But theoretically, a civet bite or sneeze could infect its owner?so could the handling of a butchered carcass. (The virus is unlikely to survive cooking, so it probably wasn't contracted by a diner in a restaurant...
...virus e-mail has an attachment with names like “approved.pif,” “movie28.pif,” or “application.pif” that contains the Palyh worm. The files act like normal executable files, and they infect the host machine when opened...