Word: influenza
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Everybody's talking about Spring Break Irony. After all, the jet-set kiddies who checked out of school extra early and rocketed toward the global waistline ended up with gastrointestinal trouble, mysterious influenza, rainy weather and lousy tans. Meanwhile, the Harvard-bound kicked back with giardia-free lattes and basted themselves under balmy skies...
...actress Eleonora Duse, the great dancer Anna Pavlova last week died in a hotel, in a strange country. In France, near Dijon, a railroad accident kept her waiting for hours in an unheated train. She caught cold and by the time she reached The Hague, planning to dance there, influenza had developed, also pleurisy. Death came swiftly, in three days. On the third day she roused from a coma and spoke to Victor Dandre, her husband and accompanist. She thought she was herself again, high on her toes, poised for dancing. "Play that last measure softly," she said...
...anyone who knew influenza, the news instantly raised the specter of 1918. Or worse, as this was a purely avian virus against which most humans would have no defense. The world, moreover, was far more densely populated, and high-speed travel now linked all the major cities. In 1918, when transportation was still painfully slow, the pandemic circled the globe in a matter of months. Traveling by jet, a new killer virus could reach Tokyo in three hours and New York City within...
...fact that the new virus did not seem readily transmittable from person to person was a consolation, but flu experts know that influenza viruses are utterly unpredictable. In Hong Kong the big question was this: Would the H5 reassort with a common human strain to produce a new virus that was as lethal as H5 but could be passed along by a human sneeze? Or would this new H5 virus, through repeated exposure, find some other way to adapt to human hosts? "That's an interesting point," says Shortridge, "because it raises questions about the 1918 pandemic. Did a similar...
Using an array of powerful if arcane gene-hunting tools, Taubenberger and Reid slowly picked their way through the shattered genetic landscape of Private Vaughn's cells. This time they got lucky. They found small pieces of flulike RNA. Their subsequent analysis showed that the virus was an H1N1 influenza unlike any flu virus identified during the past 80 years. The closest known strain was Swine Iowa 30--the pig flu isolated by Richard Shope in 1930 and kept alive at various culture repositories ever since. Their findings suggest that the 1918 virus came to people from pigs, not from...