Word: influenza
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...influenza virus is constantly mutating. That's why we can't get full immunity to the flu, the way we can to diseases like chicken pox, because there are multiple strains of the flu virus and they change from year to year. However, even though the virus makes us sick, our immune systems can usually muster enough of a response so that the flu is rarely fatal for healthy people...
...world is better prepared for a flu pandemic today than it has ever been. Thanks to concerns over H5N1 avian flu, the WHO, the U.S. and countries around the world have stockpiled millions of doses of antivirals that can help fight swine flu as well as other strains of influenza. The U.S. has a detailed pandemic preparation plan that was drafted under former President George W. Bush. Many other countries have similar plans. SARS and bird flu have given international health officials useful practice runs for dealing with a real pandemic. We can identify new viruses faster than ever before...
...same Hong Kong scientists who followed SARS from the moment it emerged as a mystery disease until they had identified its cause warned on Monday that swine flu poses an even greater challenge. While scientists have studied influenza for many years, the nature of the disease makes it a tough enemy to combat. With Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, patients developed symptoms around the same time they became contagious. But with the flu, a person can spread the infection days before they feel sick enough to go to a doctor. "The flu is a known devil," says Malik Peiris...
...wonder that Hong Kong has taken some of the toughest measures of any country in the effort to prevent and control the spread of the H1N1 Influenza A swine flu, which has killed more than 100 people in Mexico and infected several in the U.S., Canada and Spain, with suspected cases in Israel and New Zealand. Surgical masks, quarantines and empty streets are all too familiar for the city's 7 million residents, who saw their normally bustling lives screech to a halt six years ago, when SARS killed nearly 300 people. (See pictures of the swine flu outbreak...
...recent days, they are on high alert. Two of the three people with respiratory ailments, a 77-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter, tested negative for H1N1. The third, a 27-year-old woman who had been to San Francisco, tested positive for a human influenza subtype, not swine flu. Rated "serious" on the government's influenza-alert scale, swine flu was named a notifiable disease on Monday, which means doctors are required by law to report any suspected cases...