Word: influenza
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...World Health Organization (WHO) raised the pandemic alert level on Wednesday evening to phase 5, signaling that the first influenza pandemic in more than 40 years was imminent. That announcement came on a day when the H1N1 swine flu virus continued to spread worldwide, with new cases confirmed in Austria, Germany, Britain, New Zealand and Israel, bringing the global caseload...
...pandemic threat goes well beyond one or two countries. "An influenza pandemic should be taken seriously because of its capacity to spread rapidly," said WHO director-general Margaret Chan. "We do not have all the answers now. But we will get them...
...amid fears of bioterrorism or a deadly bird-flu outbreak, President George W. Bush proposed the $7 billion National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, meant to boost the availability of antivirals, ventilators and vaccines. Bush's plan was never fully funded; $870 million for flu-pandemic preparedness was actually dropped from the stimulus bill earlier this year. Still, it allowed the CDC to send diagnostic tests to labs around the country to track the flu's spread, while 11 million courses of Tamiflu were made available. "We are seeing a much more clear and cogent response than in the past," says...
...days of fever, chills and generally feeling rotten: that's a typical case of the flu. But several times a century, flu viruses mutate so radically that they can trigger a pandemic--as health experts fear could happen with swine flu. Influenza may go all the way back to the dawn of medicine; a similar illness was first described by Hippocrates, in Greece in 412 B.C. In 1485, a flulike "sweating sickness" swept across Britain, leaving many dead--and treatments of the time, including the bleeding of patients, didn't help...
...Spanish-flu pandemic ended only when the virus had infected so many people that it burned itself out. Today, doctors have better tools--antivirals and respirators--that would cut the potential death toll. But influenza is unpredictable. "There's no standard picture for how this develops," says Keiji Fukuda, a top World Health Organization official. We can prepare, but in the end, we're at the mercy of a virus...