Word: influenza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...labored breathing had possibly come down with the disease. Virologists in Hong Kong soon determined that the agent was a novel coronavirus, not a mutant flu. But Urbani, who would die of SARS on March 29, went to his grave suspecting the world was on the verge of another influenza pandemic...
...Nearly a year later, his worst fear may be coming true. If a virus, as Nobel laureate Peter Medawar described it, "is a piece of bad news wrapped in a protein," the past few weeks have had all the bad news the world can handle as avian influenza has broken out in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam. Already, the disease appears to have jumped the species barrier, killing at least four people, and the virus is suspected of causing another 10 deaths. Asia has stared down avian-flu outbreaks before, notably in Hong Kong in 1997 when the city...
...avian flu in July, and the apparent Vietnamese cover-up, would mean that this virus has had months to roll through the chicken population, possibly mutating and becoming more pathogenic as it goes. The culprit this time is the same as in Hong Kong in 1997: the H5N1 influenza virus. Historically, this virus has wreaked havoc mainly on poultry. Among chickens, the disease manifests itself as a hemorrhagic fever, turning a pen of healthy birds into a bloody mass of goop and feathers within 24 hours. Since the 1960s, each reported appearance of the disease has drawn a rapid response...
...Their fear is that of all the diseases in the world today?from SARS to AIDS, anthrax to Ebola?the single microbe with the greatest potential to become, as epidemiologists say, a "slate wiper," is influenza. Previous pandemics, such as the global outbreak of 1918 that killed an estimated 60 million people, have precipitated some of the greatest die-offs in history. We've all had the flu, of course, but those few days off from work with the sniffles are a completely different illness from that caused by a novel influenza against which we have no immunity. Without antiviral...
...does a chicken flu become a human flu? The answer is in the RNA of the virus itself. Influenza viruses are known as shape-shifters, possessing the rare ability to swap proteins with other influenza viruses to create, essentially, new influenza viruses. As long as an H5N1 virus stays in its host species?ducks?then there is little risk of a human pandemic arising. But once that virus has infected chickens, then the chances of jumping to human beings, usually through contact with chicken feces, rise considerably. In humans, the virus is more likely to swap proteins with a human...