Word: influenza
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Chances are your shirt, your pants and your underwear all came from southern China, the new manufacturing center of the world. Add one more export: your flu virus. With its dense populations of people and animals trading germs back and forth, southern China has been the traditional birthplace of influenza, including the nasty strain of H5N1 bird flu that's keeping public-health officials awake at night. The viruses that evolve in a chicken in southern China's Guangdong province could eventually end up in your lungs--and that's what makes a chain-smoking, impetuous Chinese virologist named...
Guan doesn't lack for scientific chutzpah, but it takes a little self-confidence to rise from Jiangxi Medical College in the heartland of China, where Guan earned his M.D. at age 21, to a corner office in Hong Kong and a position as one of the most important influenza experts in the world. As we inch closer to a possible flu pandemic, Guan keeps gathering his data, doing his part to piece together the puzzle that is the avian flu. "I do this work for the whole world," he says. "For the first time, human beings have the ability...
...Bush told "as many leaders as I could find" about the need to track the avian-flu virus so that "the world scientific community can analyze the facts." But the ability of scientists in poorer countries to do just that could suffer when federal funding for the Los Alamos Influenza Sequence Database runs out at the end of the month. Until now, access to the online database--used by researchers to compare the genetic codes of new flu strains with the world's biggest collection of flu sequences--has been free. But Los Alamos officials say that without...
...Roche has donated Tamiflu to Turkey and Romania, where the H5N1 influenza virus has lately made an appearance, and given 30 million doses to the World Health Organization. But until its recent change of heart, the company had maintained that while it can't produce as much as the world is demanding, it alone would retain the right to sell the medicine. Anyone hoping to replicate the 10-step manufacturing process, it had warned, would spend around three years ramping up production from scratch...
...wild birds heading across the Urals toward Africa stop off at the protected wetlands site at Lake Manyas in Asian Turkey. That may explain why, not far away at a farm in Kiziksa, 1,700 turkeys died this month. Scientists confirmed they were infected with H5N1, the avian influenza strain responsible for 60 human deaths in Asia since 2003. Experts now fear the virus is inexorably winging its way toward Europe. Turkish authorities quickly imposed a quarantine around the infected farm, culling 8,600 birds. But another H5N1 outbreak hit Romania's Danube delta wetlands, across the Black Sea from...