Word: influenza
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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...
...hosts were skeptical of the impetuous virologist, remembering that it had been Yi, in the early days of the first epidemic, who kept incorrectly insisting that SARS was a novel form of avian influenza. Even after the genetic sequences had arrived, his peers were unconvinced. "When someone is showing you raw data, you have to be careful," said Dr. Xu Ruiheng, deputy director of the Guangdong CDC. "You have to ask yourself, is this real or is this fabricated?" In turn, Yi asked his counterparts if they had the sequences for the human patient now recovering in Guangzhou...