Word: influenza
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...still unknown about it, including where it came from, exactly how it spreads, how long its incubation period lasts (and thus how long a victim has been contagious when symptoms appear) and whether a vaccine will ever be available. Infectious-disease specialists are haunted by the great Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-19; it killed fewer than 3% of its victims but infected so many that at least 20 million people died in just 18 months--more than were killed in combat in World War I. And until health officials know for sure what they're dealing with, they tend...
...patients started showing up at the Prince of Wales Hospital. Hong Kong health officials have become particularly skilled at identifying respiratory diseases because the city is located so near the rich agricultural zones of southeastern China, where pigs, poultry and millions of people live in close proximity. Illnesses like influenza routinely jump from animals to humans, which is why new strains of flu often originate in Asia. Alert to the fact that something strange was going on, authorities in Hong Kong quickly notified WHO and began trying to determine how the disease arrived on the island and how it might...
...meantime, we wait to see if SARS can adapt with the same deadly efficiency as influenza?and once a virus achieves airborne transmission from one person to another, the consequences might be as brutal as the 1918 flu that killed one in 60 of all the people on earth. Perhaps if we knew that SARS had come from another species, we could identify how it had changed and we could design drugs or vaccines to tackle it. By the time we had produced them, however, the disease would already have done its deadly damage. Once again, we find ourselves...
...Hong Kong's health officials suspect the superspreader who may have brought SARS to Amoy Gardens is a man with a history of kidney disease. After being treated for influenza at the Prince of Wales Hospital?site of the second major cluster of SARS cases in Hong Kong after the Metropole Hotel?the man visited his brother, who lived on the 12th floor of Block E in Amoy Gardens. During his four visits to the housing complex, the man, who also suffered from diarrhea, might have spread the virus through his bodily waste. (Scientists believe the virus may be present...
...Many viral outbreaks tend to burn out, as a population naturally develops immunity to the particular pathogens. But a virus can also be devastating, as was in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918-19 (see viewpoint). Although that flu's mortality rate was only 2%, the virus had infected so many people that it felled 40 million victims in 18 months?more than the total death toll from combat in World War I. So far, SARS' fatality rate is 4%, comparable to normal, noncontagious pneumonia's. Optimists point out that in the three weeks that SARS has gripped Hong Kong...