Word: labs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 a vexing economic...
...Hong Kong, mortality was 100%. The scientists knew the virus had a variation of the H gene known as H5--one that is notoriously lethal to chickens. Shortridge did briefly wonder if the virus might eventually cause problems for humans. In an earlier study, conducted with great discretion, his lab had found that residents of rural Hong Kong had antibodies to all the known bird-flu viruses. What that suggested, says Shortridge, was that "any virus could cross the species barrier to humans. But whether it could set up an infection, be established as an infection and maintained...
...Jong had felt it necessary to come in person to Hong Kong, why he had waited until now to tell her about the virus. He suspected that the H5 had not really come from human patients but was the result of laboratory contamination. Everyone knew that her lab was situated close to Shortridge's and that Shortridge worked with avian viruses. Moreover, this was Hong Kong, where poultry stalls with live chickens could be found in the same neighborhoods as five-star hotels. "I think he came to Hong Kong to have a look-see if it was a sloppy...
...called within a few weeks. He had found fragments of the 1918 virus in Hultin's Lucy. Taubenberger and Reid had meanwhile recovered yet another sample of 1918 virus from tissues in the Armed Forces annex. Taken together, the three samples put to rest any doubt that Taubenberger's lab had indeed found and sequenced key portions of the original Spanish-flu virus...
...virology lab got its usual load of new specimens to analyze, including one from a two-year-old boy admitted the day before to Queen Mary Hospital. Her lab applied the ordinary WHO reagents for H3 and H1, but just as in May, got no reaction. This time Lim tried an H5 reagent supplied by the CDC. And got a positive reading...