Word: viruses
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Chances are your shirt, your pants and your underwear all came from southern China, the new manufacturing center of the world. Add one more export: your flu virus. With its dense populations of people and animals trading germs back and forth, southern China has been the traditional birthplace of influenza, including the nasty strain of H5N1 bird flu that's keeping public-health officials awake at night. The viruses that evolve in a chicken in southern China's Guangdong province could eventually end up in your lungs--and that's what makes a chain-smoking, impetuous Chinese virologist named...
...take blood and feces samples from their chickens and waterfowl. From those samples, Guan and his team have managed to sequence the genetic code for more than 250 strains of H5N1--giving them a chillingly accurate picture of how widespread bird flu is in the region and how the virus is mutating. "We have to know what's in animals, so we know what could be in human beings," says Guan...
...knows from experience how important that is. It was Guan who discovered, through field data he gathered, that civet cats were probably spreading the SARS virus to human beings. Guan formulated his hypothesis just as SARS was beginning to return in Guangdong at the start of 2004. A more patient scientist might have waited and harvested more data. But patience is not Guan's strong suit, and with new human cases surfacing, there wasn't time. Putting his scientific reputation on the line, he gave his preliminary results to authorities in Guangdong and urged them to cull civets being sold...
...income. "When I asked if they donated blood, many said yes, many, many times--30, 40, sometimes 100 to 200 times," Gui recalls. Tragically, the needles used--some in the hands of entrepreneurial middlemen known locally as "blood heads"--were not always sterile. All it would need for the virus to take hold was one HIV-positive donor...
...respond and refused to allow Gui to return to the villages. So he and three students sneaked back in during a long weekend holiday when he knew the gatekeepers might be off duty. For three days he went house to house, collecting samples, counseling patients and explaining how the virus is spread...