Word: viruses
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...movies. No reason to worry about any of this, right? There isn't as long as you don't read Hari Kunzru's new novel, Transmission, in which an unhappy Indian programmer is driven by job insecurity and his obsession with a Bollywood starlet to write a vicious computer virus and unleash it on the world. The misadventures of this renegade geek-along with those of the starlet, her mother, a shallow London marketing executive, his promiscuous girlfriend, a couple of xenophobic European bureaucrats and a Korean society devoted to an online fantasy game-combine to make for what...
...scarce. He finally lands a posting at Virugenix, a company that protects businesses from viral attacks, only to be laid off for no fault of his own. That's when he decides he'll win his job back (and simultaneously declare his affection for Zahir) by releasing a computer virus bearing her image. Like a pyromaniac who starts fires so he can be the hero who reports them, Mehta plans to inform his company how to stop the virus before things get out of hand. But his scheme goes seriously awry, to the discomfort of practically everyone on earth...
...research studies warn, however, that widespread human infection may be only a matter of time. A report published in Nature last week by scientists at the University of Hong Kong and Shantou University shows that the H5N1 virus has evolved rapidly since it first infected humans in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six. The result was the powerful strain of H5N1 that caused this winter's unusually widespread and lethal outbreak. Another recent study shows that the latest strains of the virus proved the most deadly to lab mice-raising worries that H5N1 is also becoming increasingly dangerous to humans...
...real fear is that H5N1 could crossbreed with a standard human-flu virus to create a highly lethal, highly contagious strain with the potential to cause a global flu pandemic. Professor Yi Guan of the University of Hong Kong, the lead researcher on the Nature paper, worries that H5N1 is evolving so fast that it may gain the ability to infect humans by mutating on its own, without mixing with a human virus, much as SARS did. Yi says the latest outbreaks show that the virus has become endemic to the region, with a difficult-to-eradicate foothold in migratory...
...RESIGNED. YEOH ENG-KIONG, 58, Hong Kong's Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food; to take responsibility for last year's sars outbreak, which killed 299 people in the territory. Yeoh stepped down after an official report criticized him for failing to contain the virus because of lax supervision and poor planning. His departure was followed by that of the head of Hong Kong's Hospital Authority, Leong Che-hung...