Word: pathogens
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...squalid part of Hohhot in front of a garbage dump, a doctor eagerly opens an express-mail package sent by a colleague in Beijing. Inside it are pages of SARS research from the University of West Virginia, which points to antioxidants as a possible treatment for the mysterious pathogen. "Our preventive measures aren't sufficient," he says. "Beijing sent us instructions about how to prepare for this disease, but before we had time to get ready, the disease was upon...
...virus's worst enemy is the human immune system. When an unknown pathogen like the new coronavirus invades, the body naturally develops antibodies that can seek out and destroy the interloper. The process takes time, however, and sometimes the system doesn't react fast enough. Science can help with vaccines, which prep the body to recognize and produce antibodies against a particular attacker, such as polio. A vaccine for SARS is under development, but even the most optimistic researchers say it may take more than a year to come up with one that works...
...times, the organisms are fuzzy little balls that fill the screen and look like the burrs that stick to your pants during a hike through the woods. You can just make out tiny hooks poking out of the spherical bodies--a telltale characteristic that helps classify the pathogen as a member of the coronavirus family. And while coronaviruses normally cause nothing more serious than a cold, the microbes on Nicholls' slide have evidently, for reasons researchers have yet to discover, mutated into a sometimes deadly infectious agent that has terrified the entire planet...
...Less than two weeks ago, medical investigators thought they might be getting a grip on this puzzling killer. Doctors emerged from their labs to announce they had identified the likely pathogen that causes SARS: a mutation of the coronavirus that normally causes nothing more harmful than the common cold. Researchers averred that while the disease was contagious, it chiefly required close contact with an infected patient to be spread, most likely through respiratory droplets sprayed into the air by a cough or sneeze. Finally, quarantines were instituted in Singapore, Canada and, after much dithering, in Hong Kong, leading to predictions...
...Doctors outside China were scrambling last week to pin down how the pathogen is transmitted?critical in stopping the disease from spreading further. After painstakingly tracing patients' histories, scientists have deduced that the disease is probably spread through direct contact with bodily fluids, such as phlegm. Here again, cooperation from Chinese authorities might have helped. As long ago as Jan. 21, an official internal advisory?issued to doctors in Guangdong and later obtained by Time?laid out how the disease appears to be transmitted. "Given that the explosion of the epidemic was mainly in the same area and some patients...