Word: strained
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...regular flu season, reduced opportunities for reassortment, as did the prompt slaughter of the chickens. But the flu season is coming. It will peak in late February and early March, with a second peak this summer. What researchers fear most is that someone infected with a common flu strain will also become infected with H5, and thus become an inadvertent mixing chamber for the production of a wholly new virus...
...strain of influenza persisted into the '20s, then disappeared, or lost its virulence and faded into the great jigsaw of constantly reassorting viruses. Until lately, the epidemic had almost disappeared from our collective memory as well, prompting Crosby to title his history The Forgotten Epidemic. Among flu experts, however, its mysteries are still current and utterly significant. It has always stood as a vivid warning of what the next pandemic could be like. What made the virus so lethal? Why was it able to kill so quickly? And where in nature did it originate...
...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...
...picked their way through the shattered genetic landscape of Private Vaughn's 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...
...style mattered little in the end as the contest came down to a rather old-fashioned battle of stamina. Although the world didn't know it, Stojko--as his coach revealed after the competition was over--had been suffering from a groin injury for the past month. The strain on his body became all too evident during the crucial 4.5-min. free skate on Saturday. (The free skate counts for two-thirds of a competitor's final score.) Kulik won the gold with an effortless show, and Stojko was forced to settle for silver, as he did in Lillehammer. Except...