Word: viruses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scientists from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health and the Mexican government is now beginning an investigation in Mexico, taking blood samples and swabbing the inside of pigs' nostrils, looking for H1N1 infection. The hope is to find out how prevalent the virus is among Mexican pigs - if at all - and begin to trace back the virus...
...easy. It took years to find the original animal sources of SARS and HIV, among other new diseases. What makes tracking emerging viruses inside wildlife populations all the more difficult is that animals - even more than people - move around a lot, across borders. The U.S. imports live pigs from Europe, while Mexico takes in some 600,000 pigs a year from the U.S., so it's entirely possible that the virus began in Europe (the H1N1 virus has Eurasian genes), then moved to America and Mexico with pigs before infecting the first human. "It's going to take several weeks...
Although it is too late to put the H1N1 virus back in the bottle, there are lessons to be learned for containing future pandemics. One is the need to improve monitoring of the trade in live animals, which can spread new diseases across borders and even oceans. Peter Daszak, president of the Wildlife Trust, notes in a newly published paper in Science that the U.S. alone has imported more than 1.5 billion live animals since 2000, the majority of which undergo no testing for pathogens before or after shipment. At the height of the H1N1 scare last week, many Americans...
...case we had any doubts, the rapid spread of the H1N1 virus should convince us that biologically, we live in one world, sharing microbes between species and across borders. When it comes to crafting a global early-warning system equal to the challenges posed by new pathogens, we're only as strong as our weakest link, whether that's the lack of animal-disease surveillance in the U.S. or the less-than-ideal laboratory capacity in Mexico. "We have to break down the barriers between organizations and agencies," says Lubroth. "It's one world, one health...
...most, in terms of distributing and standing surveillance. Once it's inside your borders, that's not effective - by the time you know it's there, it's likely to be in many places. So all along, I've been trying to get a message out that the virus is likely all over. We're finding it in many parts of the country...