Word: strainful
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What will happen during the next pandemic? No one can predict, but even a virus as mild as the 1968 strain would kill many tens of thousands in the U.S. alone. Since 1968, demographic changes have made influenza a greater, not a lesser, threat. Our population now includes more elderly and more people with a weakened immune system. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that influenza kills 36,000 Americans in an average year. The CDC also calculates that a pandemic caused by a virus comparable to that of 1968 would kill between...
...book on the 1918 pandemic that killed more than 50 million people worldwide and that serves as a reminder of the kind of threat that the world could face (see ESSAY). A reconstruction of the 1918 virus, reported in scientific journals last week, shows it to be an avian strain that mutated just enough to infect humans directly and easily...
...viruses adapt to the point that they can infect people. Each year the viruses capable of invading human cells mutate slightly in a way that leads to fresh outbreaks, but most people will still have a partial immunity because of previous exposure to similar viruses. Occasionally, though, a strain that had seemed to infect only birds will cross over more or less intact into humans. Because this new strain is so different from garden-variety flu viruses, few people are immune. That is apparently what happened in 1918 and in Hong Kong in 1997, then later in Vietnam and Thailand...
Virologists named the newest strain of avian flu H5N1, after two proteins (hemagglutinin and neuraminidase) that dot the surface of the virus like spikes on a mace. Since 2003, more than 100 people have become sick enough to come to the attention of health authorities, and at least 60 of them have died. So far, the vast majority have been infected through close contact with birds; human-to-human infection is still extremely rare. What gives health authorities nightmares is the possibility that the lethal H5N1 could mutate into a virus that is easily passed among humans...
Eight department chairs interviewed by The Crimson said there were two key reasons, aside from the strain brought on by the rapid growth of the Faculty, behind the decision to put the brakes on Faculty expansion.d