Word: viruses
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...epidemic first emerged in the West more than 20 years ago, AIDS was circulating primarily among young gay men. Today, a record 39.4 million people, nearly half of them women, are infected with HIV, according to the latest report from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. The virus moved deeper into Asia and Eastern Europe, and new cases arose in every region of the globe, evidence of the need for more effective programs for treatment and prevention, such as halting the transmission from mother to child. Breast feeding accounts for as much as half of new infections among children...
When the Spanish flu struck the world in 1918, one leading physician, a former president of the American Medical Association, thought he was seeing the end of civilization. It was a reasonable conclusion. The virus rampaged throughout the world, leaving morgues overstuffed with bodies. In 1917, the year before the flu hit, life expectancy in the U.S. was 51 years. In 1918, it was 39 years-a drop that was due almost entirely to the flu. Worldwide, 100 million or more may have died from the Spanish flu, including 20 million in India alone. And with avian influenza, it could...
...against that fate? Far too little. Work on the one tool that can make the biggest difference in the severity of a pandemic-an effective vaccine-has been underfunded. Thanks to a new technique called reverse genetics, researchers were able to create a vaccine strain from the H5N1 virus in record time-yet the candidate vaccine is just now entering clinical trials, because drug companies have been loathe to invest in a vaccine that may never be used, and governments have been reluctant to fully fund the work. The vaccine won't be ready for five or six months, well...
...That's assuming they weren't sick themselves. If the bird-flu virus spread at the rate Omi estimated, nearly a third of the world's population could become ill. That means a third of the world's police officers, government officials, soldiers, technicians-and medical workers-could be knocked out for weeks. Even the temporary loss of such a large part of the work force could lead to severe disruptions of public services-and complicate efforts to fight the pandemic. Countries and businesses need contingency plans in place now, yet in Asia only Japan has any real pandemic scheme...
...test has never been easier. With the new OraQuick Advance, a health professional simply swabs the inside of a person's mouth along the upper and lower gums and then inserts the stick into a vial of solution that tests for antibodies to the HIV-1 and HIV-2 virus strains. Within 20 minutes, the results appear on the stick. (Two reddish-purple lines indicate a positive result.) The OraQuick's accuracy rate: over...