Word: shope
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...discovered that something was making their pigs very sick, with high fevers and bad coughs. No such pig flu had ever been noticed before 1918, but every fall thereafter an influenza-like illness attacked the nation's hog population. In 1928 a researcher from the Rockefeller Institute, Richard E. Shope, went to Iowa to investigate the phenomenon, and in 1930 he became the first scientist to isolate an influenza virus. Copies of it are stored today in laboratories around the world...
...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 birds--although Taubenberger cites studies by Webster and others indicating that human viruses and the pig flu of the 1930s may share a common avian ancestor...
Scientists believe Ebola virus made just that kind of jump, from monkeys into humans; so did other African viruses such as Marburg and the mysterious X that broke out in Sudan. And many more are likely to emerge. "In the Brazilian rain forest," says Dr. Robert Shope, a Yale epidemiologist, "we know of at least 50 different viruses that have the capacity of making people sick. There are probably hundreds more that we haven't found...
Creating a vaccine for each strain of flu isn't exactly simple either. "First," says Yale's Shope, "we have to discover something new is happening. Then we have to find a manufacturer willing to make a vaccine. Then the experts have to meet and decide what goes into the vaccine. Then the factory has to find enough hens' eggs in which to grow the vaccine. There are just a lot of logistical concerns...
...drugs and get information to the public would be enormously expensive. But the price of doing nothing may be measured in millions of lost lives. Doctors are still hopeful but no longer overconfident. "I do believe that we're intelligent enough to keep ahead of things," says epidemiologist Shope. Nonetheless, neither he nor any of his colleagues will ever again be foolish enough to declare victory in the war against the microbes...