Word: viruses
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...have to take everything because we know so little about devils,? she says. The animals ?have been like seagulls,? says her pathologist colleague Richmond Loh, ?so common that no one?s really studied them.? Now Loh and others are racing to determine whether the disease is caused by a virus, how it?s transmitted and how it progresses. Until such questions are answered, radical options such as relocating devils onto offshore islands remain too risky. No one knows if DFTD could jump to livestock or people, and it?s so cryptic, Loh says, that pathologists cannot agree on what sort...
...odds of that happening are still small, and the risk to Westerners who do not come into direct contact with Asian birds is infinitesimal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. But the farther the virus spreads, and the more people who become infected with it, the greater the risk...
Health officials have long been worried that the next deadly global epidemic--a slate wiper, as epidemiologists call it--would be a new kind of deadly flu to which humans have no resistance. And since the 1960s, their fears have been focused on the H5N1 virus, a bird pathogen that is generally harmless in its host species (ducks and other wildfowl) but extremely deadly when contracted by chickens. It was H5N1 that struck Hong Kong in 1997, where it went straight from chickens to humans. Authorities quickly killed 1.4 million birds, and although six people died, the disease never managed...
What scares scientists most about H5N1 is that someone eventually will be stricken by the bird flu and a human flu at the same time, allowing the viruses to swap genetic material. The resulting hybrid could be both deadly and virulent. Even if it weren't immediately contagious, it could quickly evolve. A study published last week in the journal Science reported that the SARS virus mutated in a matter of months from a form that could infect only 3% of people who came in contact with it to one that infected 70%. Once it mutated, SARS quickly spread around...
...virus probably originates in southern China, but no one knows how it has spread so widely. Transport of infected birds to chicken farms is one theory, but it's also possible that migratory birds such as ducks and geese are spreading it through their droppings. "Did birds in Hong Kong, which nest in Siberia and North Korea, somehow spread the virus elsewhere?" asks Robert Webster, an expert in animal influenzas at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. "That's a frightening possibility." If H5N1 does evolve into a flu that humans can spread, a vaccine could...