Word: viruses
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...food. Although they had heard that the avian influenza that swept Southeast Asia last year had returned, they thought the disease was confined to the south. The day after the funeral, Viet fell sick with flulike symptoms. He was hospitalized on Dec. 31, and tested negative for the H5N1 virus that causes avian flu. Viet deteriorated rapidly and died on Jan. 9. The next day, his younger brother Nguyen Thanh Hung, who had taken care of Viet in the hospital, became ill. When Thanh Hung's blood test came back positive for H5N1, doctors retested Viet's blood and found...
...were health authorities, who initially feared that the Nguyen family cluster meant the H5N1 virus?which usually only spreads from bird to human in isolated cases?might now be moving from person to person. Since the disease first began jumping from birds to people in 1997, scientists have been worried that the lethal virus could mutate to gain the ability to transmit from one person to another as easily as a normal human-flu virus. That would open the door for a global influenza pandemic that could kill millions...
...were infected by their raw-duck-blood porridge as by each other. "It's too early to tell," says Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's (WHO) Hanoi representative. Even if there was person-to-person transmission within the family, it hasn't spread farther, as a pandemic-causing virus likely would. (A recent New England Journal of Medicine article confirmed that such limited human-to-human transmissions occurred last September in Thailand.) But the threat of a pandemic hasn't diminished: as of last Friday, Vietnam has reported 15 human cases of bird flu since mid-December...
...West Nile hit Chicago hard. At the end of the year, after 22 had died from the virus, the city's public-health officials looked back and asked what could have been done differently. An answer came from an unlikely source: data collected from 311, a hotline for residents to request city services. Nearly 4,000 calls had been placed that summer and early fall to ask the sanitation department to pick up dead crows. The public-health team, knowing that dead birds often mean West Nile is afoot, overlaid maps of 311 calls and human cases of the virus...
...kind of pessimistic. It’s so easy to impress judges with heavily connoted words like ‘virus,’ ‘pirate,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘hacker’ and it’s difficult on the other hand to explain the scientific method and the deep curiosity that makes us analyze how software works and find their flaws,” Tena wrote last March on his website...