Word: reassortment
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
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