Word: influenzae
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Because poultry is a vital part of Hong Kong's diet, agricultural authorities got concerned and quickly consulted Kennedy Shortridge, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong. He in turn contacted his friend and fellow flu specialist Robert Webster of St. Jude. For decades both men had studied influenza viruses in chickens and other birds in the belief that these viruses were more than just an agricultural problem and might hold the key to the origins of human influenza, possibly even the virus...
Shortridge and Webster immediately recognized the gravity of the chicken-flu outbreak in Hong Kong, at least for the region's chicken industry. They knew that while avian influenza did not ordinarily make its host sick, a benign virus could reassort to produce a pathogen of almost inconceivable lethality. Webster's Memphis lab had observed such a transformation in the wild on two occasions, the first in April 1983, when a relatively mild influenza struck chickens on the vast chicken farms of Pennsylvania. The birds got visibly sick, some died and egg production fell, but overall the outbreak remained only...
...startled. "I'm not a vet," she says. "I don't know much about influenza in animals." But she had never heard of H5 infecting humans. For it to do so now was surprising. Even impossible...
Like Webster, virologists around the world were galvanized. The CDC, alerted by Claas, quickly tested its own copy of Lim's virus and confirmed the finding. In San Francisco, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief epidemiologist for the CDC's influenza section, was doing a clinical rotation at Mount Zion Hospital when he received an urgent call from the agency's head of surveillance. "Whenever you get a call like that," he says, "you know it's probably not great news." Shortridge was vacationing in England when his phone went wild. "The first thing that crossed my mind was, 'Is this...
...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...